| re: Lin-Manuel Miranda reacts to critics and calls to #CancelHamilton | |
| Posted by: tatanaz 08:37 pm EDT 07/07/20 | |
| In reply to: re: Lin-Manuel Miranda reacts to critics and calls to #CancelHamilton - lordofspeech 07:45 pm EDT 07/07/20 | |
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| Cancel culture can get out of hand. But as many people regularly demonstrate, freaking out over cancel culture—and making slippery slope arguments—can also get out of hand. First, it’s important to remember that calls to “cancel” don’t always mean the same thing, and they certainly don’t always mean the same thing to everyone involved in these conversations. What started as an online/social call to damage and even end the careers of people in the public eye who had done or said truly egregious things, has now morphed into a way of expressing concern, outrage, and a personal desire to not support certain people or things. In other words, it’s often simply a way of calling attention to something that people find problematic. It doesn’t take much looking into the posts and tweets that refer to cancelling Hamilton to see that for many, if not most, they don’t actually want Hamilton the musical to cease to exist. They instead use the term to raise awareness about what many people perceive to be problematic about Hamilton. And, for what it’s worth, LMM has insisted that many of their concerns are valid. I’m not saying that there aren’t some people who don’t literally want Hamilton to end. But calls to “cancel” are very often much less literal. Second, even if people wanted to actually cancel Hamilton, that doesn’t mean those same people would necessarily want to cancel other plays or works from the past they find problematic. Some people just want context. Despite similar freaking out about supposed cancel culture and Gone With the Wind, the film still is available. HBO Max simply pulled it for a few weeks to add some historical context at the start in order to show how Gone With the Wind was itself literally a piece of propaganda designed to rewrite the history of the south. And that fact should be remembered as we watch it in order to ensure that history doesn’t continue to be misunderstood. Similarly, people who want confederate statues removed don’t want us to rewrite history and pretend the confederacy didn’t exist. They just don’t think it should be celebrated, which statues clearly do. And, again, most of these statues were expressly designed to celebrate a rewritten history, just like Gone with the Wind. Getting back to theater, few people are going to want Merchant of Venice “cancelled” or erased. But they also wouldn’t want it taught or presented at its face value: as a play that shows how evil Jews are (yes I realize that is a bit reductive to say the least). Instead, people want Merchant to be properly contextualized for what it is: a play that engages in anti Semitism and was originally produced in a deeply anti Semitic culture. I think one of the things that does make Hamilton difficult is that while it is about history, it isn’t really a historical piece. It was written now. And it was written and has been oft touted as engaging in an innovative and important way with issues of race today. So it does feel like it should have done better in regards to thinking about these “characters” and slavery. And, at the end of the day, I think that’s what most posts about cancelling Hamilton are saying: we wish it did more—and let’s maybe not get too effusive in our praise of the piece as revelatory from the perspective of race and ethnicity. Instead, let’s be educated and aware of what it rewrites. Hamilton will be fine. 1776 will be fine. Shakespeare will be Fine. Cancel doesn’t always literally mean cancel. “Everyone needs to calm down” goes both ways. |
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| Previous: | re: Lin-Manuel Miranda reacts to critics and calls to #CancelHamilton - lordofspeech 07:45 pm EDT 07/07/20 |
| Next: | re: Lin-Manuel Miranda reacts to critics and calls to #CancelHamilton - Michael_Portantiere 11:35 pm EDT 07/07/20 |
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