24
Trish Loughran
“Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”
Hamilton libretto, Lin‐Manuel Miranda
The United States of America has always been a figment. The nation is, as Benedict Anderson (1991) has memorably written, an imagined community, and the independent, self‐authorized citizen is that dreamworld’s golem. That the liberal nation‐state and its people were and are fabricated seems hardly a matter of contest. In fact, one of the bedrock principles of liberal democracy is the idea of self‐determination, which is a kind of collective self‐making, as opposed to the less sovereign subjection to fate people would seem to have experienced under hereditary monarchy. Kings inherit their thrones, as their subjects inherit their subjection. But modern political subjects are thought to have willfully invented themselves (and their polities) in the eighteenth century, on top of the shattered ruins of medieval superstition. And fascinatingly enough, they are said to have achieved this goal through writing.
How does this work? There was, of course, an armed revolution in 1776 that involved cannonballs and musket fire. Indeed, a whole series of bloody revolutions across the Atlantic World (first in the United States, then France, then Haiti, then all across Latin America) initiated what we might call the modern “freedom effect” that seems to structure our contemporary world order. But despite these military conflicts, the American Revolution is still largely remembered, as Robert Ferguson (1994) has said, as “a literary pursuit,” and he cites the founders themselves, such as Jefferson, Hamilton, and Adams (who were also all writers), as proof. The eighteenth‐century historian David Ramsay likewise declared as early as 1789 that “the pen and the press had merit equal to that of the sword,” while John Adams never tired (even on his deathbed, in 1818) of puffing “the records, pamphlets, newspapers, and even handbills” of 1776 as the true agents of change (Ferguson 1994: 347, 426, 347).
And no wonder. Writing solves a problem for modern states. Not only do founding documents serve as archives that memorialize the origins of the current order, whose seemingly transparent beginnings make them seem all the more modern (unlike the dim and undocumented recesses of time in which monarchy emerged). They also help to manage the memory of violence and terror in which all states, all revolutions, all governments are born. But if writing solves problems for modern states and their citizens, it also causes some, and it’s those problems on which this essay will focus. To think through these issues, I will draw on a range of both old and new texts, starting with some of the early national period’s usual suspects (Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist, and the Constitution) but ending with the unlikely revalorization of this early American archive in the Broadway musical Hamilton. The first four texts, and the events they called forth, in many ways form the origin story of the early American republic. In each case an authored text (first Paine’s Common Sense and then Hamilton, Madison, and Jay’s The Federalist) makes the case for what would later become communal law. Paine’s pamphlet, published in January 1776, is thought to have paved the way for the Declaration of Independence in July of that year. Likewise, The Federalist (eventually published as a book) appeared piecemeal in newspapers as early as 1787 to prepare its readers – “the people” – for constitutional ratification in 1788 and the adoption of a new government in 1789. In the process, these four texts (and others like them) are thought to have created America and Americans. But they also left problems that are alive enough today to require continual reconsideration. My goal here is to describe these problems and the scholarly debates that surround them.
Fabulous Retroactivity
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776) has long been lionized as a foundational text of American populism, thought to speak in the voice of the people in two ways: first, through its wide circulation (it’s often cited as the first American bestseller, said to have reached millions of readers) and second, through its everyday diction, which dubs the king of England a “Brute” and his ministers “parasites,” thus setting aside fancy arguments, learned citations, and social niceties to speak in a voice that is, at least stylistically, accessible to all (103, 65). But this makes its first line that much more remarkable. “Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages,” Paine begins, “are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason” (1). In this short preface written a few weeks after the pamphlet was already in circulation, Paine admits that he is actually speaking from a minority position that is anything but universal. He does not speak for the people but to the people, with whom he expects to be at odds, and in that moment of admitting his own rhetorical and political vulnerability he turns his acid eye on anyone who would oppose him: victims of “long habit” who have fallen prey to “superficial appearance” may cause a tumult with their backward glance toward “custom” but they cannot staunch the march of “time.” His arguments here are not, despite the title of the text, “common” at all but they are, he suggests, inevitable. For Paine, revolution is as natural as time’s flow, even if almost nobody yet agreed about it, even after several weeks of discussion among the pamphlet’s very first readers. This opening makes clear what in retrospect may seem like a rather embarrassing fact of US founding: Paine’s goal is not to speak truth to power in the voice of the people but to persuade a widely dissenting readership to join what was, in January and February 1776, still a minority cause.
The fact that revolutionary sentiment has such clearly uncommon origins is ironic. Common Sense itself was dedicated to interrogating and demystifying another origin story – not its own, but government’s more generally and the monarchy’s in particular. Government “is the badge of lost innocence,” Paine famously insists in Common Sense; “the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of bowers of paradise” (6). The “boasted” English Constitution, made up of the monarchy, the hereditary House of Lords, and the elected House of Commons, is built on the “remains of two ancient tyrannies, compounded with some new republican materials,” noble enough, he argues, “for the dark and slavish times in which it was erected” but hardly suitable to the modernity of Enlightenment. “In the early ages of the world […] there were no kings,” he declares. Instead, all men were once equal. As proof, he cites scripture, but also points to the ignominious origins of British monarchy, which, he notes, lead back not to some primordial British monarch but to the bastard throne of William the (French) Conqueror (12, 14, 33, 43).
Given how powerfully Paine undermines (by illuminating) the notion of British origins, should it be any surprise that the immediate work of the Revolution was to secure its own birthright? Paine would later insist that Common Sense had, all by itself, ignited the Revolution, paving the way for the Declaration of Independence (1776), which very much seeks to speak in the unified voice of one people – a legitimate national “we.” Yet the Declaration possesses as shaky an origin story as Common Sense. Speaking at the University of Virginia in 1976 at a US bicentennial celebration, Jacques Derrida (2002) famously used the Declaration of Independence to consider the same question that haunts Paine’s Common Sense: the question of origins, of founding and its legitimation across time and space, and especially of whose idea founding might be, by whose authority it is historically constituted, first in 1776 and then forever after in the archive and in everyday life.
Derrida’s reading depends on his understanding of the Declaration as a performative utterance, one that does what it says, as opposed to a constative utterance, which would simply describe a reality outside of itself in the way a scientific treatise on natural history might describe already existing flora and fauna. Performative utterances do not reflect reality; they make reality. The Bible imagines creation as just this kind of performative act: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). The most famous everyday example of such an utterance is probably the marriage vow: “with these words, I do wed.” Political declarations are similarly performative. In the case of the US Declaration of Independence (1776), the dissolution of ties to Britain and the founding of the new state occurs in seemingly real time, with the utterance of the words: “We […]the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled […] do […] solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.” With these words, the signers say, we do found.
But as Derrida points out, the Declaration does more than found the state. It may reasonably be said to create the nation itself – in other words, “the people,” on behalf of whom the state will putatively act. And this of course produces a paradox. Just as the desire for independence was “uncommon” until Common Sense uttered it, so the Declaration authorizes itself in the name of a people that do not exist until its own utterance is complete. In this circular process, the state is founded in the name of “the people” in a document that also, in an act of “fabulous retroactivity,” creates the people which it says authorizes it (Derrida 2002: 50). The Declaration’s performative moment of founding is thus a profoundly circuitous one, made to seem more commonsensical and straightforward than it actually was (in the citation above) by the way I excerpted it to make its performativity clear. The full statement is much more of a rat’s nest than many of us might remember. The actual sentence reads:
We […] the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.
(emphasis added)
This longer version makes clear the arcane series of relays through which the United States, and its people, founded itself. The man who wrote these lines (Jefferson) was doing so on orders from Congress. But Congress itself is merely a motley collection of contingent “Representatives” who act “by Authority of the good People of these Colonies.” As Derrida points out, however, even this wasn’t enough at the outset: concerned for its own legitimacy, the document also “appeal[s] to the Supreme Judge of the world” to retroactively sanction the unpeaceful transition of power we call the American Revolution. Let there be democracy, it says. And there was.
“But just whose signature,” Derrida asks, can authorize such a God‐like utterance? (2002: 48). From whence (or from whom) does such power derive? In short, Derrida asks: “who signs, and with what so‐called proper name, the declarative act that founds an institution?” (47). If the answer is not the Congress nor the people it is said to represent, it probably can’t be the individual authors of such documents either. And yet, in perhaps a final irony, most of the authors of these documents had trouble later in life letting their individual creations stand as collective utterances. Paine, for example, did not just write a pamphlet called Common Sense in an attempt to articulate or produce “common sense.” He actually ended up using the name “Common Sense” as a pseudonym with which he closed the pamphlet, and in later years, when his authorship was well known, he traded on that celebrity by referring to himself and even signing letters with the pen name “Common Sense.” Jefferson too liked to claim unique ownership of the Declaration of Independence, even though he had been assigned the job of writing the text of the Declaration in 1776 from within a committee that had itself been assigned the task by Congress. Jefferson’s desire to be known as “the Author” of the Revolution’s most consequential document (rather than a bureaucratic tool or state functionary) is inscribed in his 1821 autobiography, where he famously included both his original text and the “mutilations” (or edits) enacted upon it by, in his words, a “pusillanimous” Congress (Ford 1914: 33). It is “as if,” Derrida wryly notes, Jefferson “had secretly dreamed of signing all alone” (48) and thus resents all input from his Congressional colleagues and their soon‐to‐be constituents. Or perhaps he simply preferred his version to what has come to be our version. In moments like this, Jefferson found himself caught in the catch‐22 of national founding. His greatest contribution to history was destined to be his authorship of a document that only matters because it speaks in the name of the people. No wonder that, on his death, the man who had been present, as other people’s proxy, at so much of the founding – as governor of Virginia, representative to the Continental Congress, ambassador to France, Secretary of State, Vice President, and finally President of the United States – took no note of any of these delegated roles. Instead, he seized (and continues to seize) authorial credit from the grave credit for three founding acts, directing his tombstone to read: “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of American Independence Of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia.” But by then, of course, the legitimacy of founding was established and the ruse of generality was no longer quite as necessary as it had once been.
RIP: Republicans in Print
For decades, scholars in early American studies have pursued the insight that hides in plain sight in the first line of Common Sense and that Derrida unfolded in his talk at the University of Virginia: that founding was not necessarily an act of the people and that consent in democratic cultures must actually be fabricated in a somewhat circuitous and tricky way, at least in the beginning. In both Common Sense and the Declaration, a particular kind of speech act appears to have solved a significant problem for the emergent liberal state, allowing it to retroactively invent itself in the names of a people that did not yet exist. But if writing solved some problems, it also created others, not least, as we have seen, because authorship is identified with authors, with particular people, with discrete personalities and agendas. But founding elites in the early United States were wary of the cult of personality, whether it be focused on a king or an author. Thus, while the “founding,” for historians of the Revolution from David Ramsay to Robert Ferguson, is tied in particular to individuals who were thought to have “authored” the nation, such texts raise the question: what makes one man (rather than another) qualified to be that author? If all men are created equal, why do some – or one – get to speak for everybody else?
Contrary to the valorization of authorship that we see by both Paine and Jefferson, many founding authors worked to obscure their authorship, and as many scholars have noted, early national print culture offered a particularly effective medium for such self‐effacement. Scholar Michael Warner (1990) has famously described the belief system that underwrites this practice as “republican print ideology,” exploring the ways that print, as a medium, helped to circulate texts and ideas away from their points of origin, including specific authors, in order to make them seem more communal, or generalized, in early republican culture (82). A good example would be the jointly authored Federalist Papers, which were initially serialized in newspapers during debates over the ratification of the Constitution and later collected into a unitary text – a book – called The Federalist (1787–1788). As in Common Sense, the authors of The Federalist chose a title that emphasized commonality. But unlike Paine’s pamphlet, The Federalist had three authors (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay) and the authorship of individual papers (who wrote what, in other words) is still being debated to this day. The plan to split writing duties was intended, at least in part, to make The Federalist speak for more than one man, one state, one region, or one set of political beliefs. This choice, of course, mirrored the national program of the Constitution itself, which was trying to create a generalized framework from the cacophony created by the state‐based Articles of Confederation. But the decision to use three authors was not just a political ruse. The collaboration had rhetorical effects that allowed The Federalist to draw on an unusually wide base of learning – in part because the voice of these “papers” (the fictional “Publius,” who signed all 85 numbers in the series) bears the knowledge of not one but three men.
As Warner (1990) has suggested, the Constitution likewise constructs its legitimacy by dispersing itself among the many, as opposed to the few – at least in theory. It does this rhetorically by speaking in the voice of “We, the People” even more phantasmatically than the Declaration did. But the Constitution also does this materially, by appearing in print, as Warner has suggested. Indeed, all of the texts I have discussed so far (Common Sense, the Declaration, The Federalist, and the Constitution) were widely circulated in print, enabling them to seem more impersonal than many imperial political announcements, especially those that came from the “mouth” of King George in the form of “Proclamations” and which, even when printed, were associated with that very particular origin. As Warner argues, print has the special ability to obscure its origins – geographically, of course (as a text circulates away from the place it began), but also by making the body who first uttered the words (or held the pen) disappear into an attenuated labor process that eventually includes not just the author but a long chain of communal transmission: from author to printer to bookseller to readers. Throughout the early national period, many authors took advantage of print’s ability to abstract by publishing their work either anonymously or, like Publius, with pseudonyms, thus relieving particular authors of the ownership that someone like Jefferson couldn’t quite allow himself to forego. For Warner, the master of this technique is Benjamin Franklin, who throughout his career coyly hid behind pseudonyms like Poor Richard or Silence Dogood rather than take authorial credit, even if those writings did, in the end, personally enrich him. In Franklin’s self‐effacing use of print, Warner sees the archetype of founding documents. The “we” in “We, the People” thus achieves its most fabulous and functional form of abstraction in print.
The efficacy of this strategy has, however, been robustly debated. However much a Franklin, Paine, or Publius might claim generality (or “common sense”), the fact remains that their texts, printed or handwritten, do in fact emanate from particular persons, and many readers understood that fact even at the time. This point was made in 1787, when Patrick Henry (1836) irately declared from the floor of the Virginia Ratifying Convention:
I have the highest veneration for those gentlemen; but, sir, give me leave to demand, What right had they to say, We, the people? […] Who authorized them to speak the language of, We, the people, instead of, We, the states? […] I have the highest respect for those gentlemen who formed the Convention. […] But, sir, on this great occasion, I would demand the cause of their conduct. […] The people gave them no power to use their name.
(22–23)
Contemporary scholars have offered similar critiques, not just of the Constitution’s use of “the people” as an authorizing agent but of the efficacy of printed texts to achieve the effect. Indeed, it is not just the particularity of authors like Paine or Jefferson that disrupts print’s ability to generalize. The body itself haunts and undermines print’s presumed ability to abstract the particular into the general. In an especially good example of this, scholar Jay Fliegelman (1993) has unearthed what he describes as the oratorical origins of the printed Declaration of Independence, which, he shows, originally included a large number of mysterious orthographic marks that resemble free‐floating apostrophes. These marks appear to have been transferred directly from Jefferson’s handwritten draft and were cryptically retained in early printed versions of the text, without anyone really noticing them or knowing what they were. Fliegelman’s research, however, into other Jefferson manuscripts shows that Jefferson used these marks in many of his writings to mark his breath while reading aloud. Fliegelman thus exposes the breathing body behind the abstractions of the printed text. Jefferson was, in other words, not just a desiring author, seeking recognition for his authorial role in national founding even from the grave. He was every inch a body in the way he wrote the Declaration of Independence and the way he imagined it would be read, out loud, to embodied audiences.
Fliegelman’s work reminds us, in a very material way, of a truth feminist and critical race scholars have made for decades: the authors of these founding documents, no matter how much they spoke in the voice of a generalized public, were in fact particular persons. In the case of the United States, these founding documents were, without exception, written by white men who used their writings to generalize their experience into a broad and putatively universal consensus that allowed one kind of person to speak for others. Because of the partiality – the patent non‐universality – of such texts, which always seem to speak for one quite particular and often exclusionary point of view, many scholars today question the efficacy of print culture as a framework for thinking inclusively and innovatively about the period, with many abandoning the printed text in favor of other ways of organizing and grounding their archives. Monique Allewaert (2013), for example, looks at manuscripts, printed texts, and material objects like African fetishes in an effort to upend the field’s overreliance on printed texts. She offers the travel journals of the botanist William Bartram as a good “test case” for thinking about the limits of print culture. For her, Bartram’s travel writings represent “a mode of agency and personhood that is not equivalent to” what we might call liberal “subjectivity” (or citizenship), something more akin to the alternative minoritarian forms of subjectivity that “developed outside the metropolitan centers associated with print culture.” To emphasize this alternative way of being‐in‐the‐world (rather than being abstracted within the representational protocols of print), Allewaert focuses on Bartram’s body, as Fliegelman focused on Jefferson’s. But she also extends her view to include the world through which Bartram moved, particularly his many trips to the swampy region of the Southeast, where, as a botanist, he traveled to learn about natural history. “Bartram,” Allewaert writes, “was a man so entwined with the tropical ecology that the projects of representation, communication, and publicity became excruciating.” Rather than becoming abstracted (in print) from the landscapes his books describe, Bartram felt his body “penetrated” by them (via heat, disease, insect and snake bites). Bodies who lived in environments like these “could not be so easily abstracted into the corpora sustained by print culture” and this fact “stalled” the conventional “representational processes” that scholars have associated with the cult of founding documents, suggesting that “in the American tropics the human body, instead of giving itself over to print cultures, was [instead] pulled into sprawling and overlapping biological, economic, and social systems” (32–33). Thus, in Allewaert’s alternative account of founding, texts do not found nations, nor do people. Environments, instead, act on individuals. The world itself has the ability to create us, rather than the other way around. The idea that we call forth our destinies is just a temporary stay against the kind of confusion we experience in the everyday world of real life.
Allewaert’s work is part of a wave of recent scholarship that places pressure on the very idea of “founding documents” and the very specific (white, male, propertied) bodies that produced them in the name of “the people.” Many scholars have in recent decades sought to locate an archive that might more reasonably be said to emanate from actual everyday people – a true democratic base, or at least a larger body politic than the one composed by the likes of Paine and Publius. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (2014), for example, has argued that print‐based accounts of this period “risk reinscribing the technologies of ‘social death’ associated with race slavery (such as forced a‐literacy)” (16). In the place of printed texts (which speak from the partial point of view of the kinds of people who authored them), Dillon explores early Atlantic world theater, where “scenes of performance often transform the absences produced by technologies of social death into the substance of creole culture” (16). She, like Allewaert, seeks to “reach beyond protocols of reason, national debate, and print nationalism.” In doing so, she describes Atlantic world theater as a scene of “commoning,” a kind of “well‐regulated riot” in which seats were “arrayed in hierarchical order” and yet “a space where relations structuring social belonging were […] contested” in a way they couldn’t be in the Continental Congress, the Constitutional Convention, or later in the US (or any nation‐based) government – or even in print (6). In theatrical spaces, Dillon argues, audiences convene en masse to watch plays in more representative assemblies that include people of every color, class, and gender and are thus inclusive in a way print culture is not because it excludes so many of “the people” it seems to speak for. In such spaces, “the people” invoked so phantasmatically in texts like Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist, and the Constitution itself become materially visible to themselves (and, after the fact, to us) in spaces of social assembly. Perhaps this is why the theater was banned in the Revolutionary United States. The people were more useful to founding in absentia than they could ever be in person.
The Return of Every Body
Early American studies has so thoroughly interrogated the idea of what constitutes an American – of how an American is “made,” either in or out of language, and who gets to utter that performative, self‐authoring language – that it sometimes seems as if it has placed its own project under erasure. If the nation really is a figment that traffics in social death for the people at its margins, then it makes sense to move on to other frameworks. Many scholars have done just that – refocusing their attention around transnational and multiracial frameworks that are more inclusive than liberal nationalism, which has been exposed, for many, as the site of a grand historical fraud. Yet not everybody has turned away from the nation and its archive. In order to grapple with the lingering appeal of founding (and its origin story: founding‐in‐language), I want to end here with a reading of the Broadway show Hamilton: An American Musical. Created by the musician Lin‐Manuel Miranda, the musical has been widely celebrated since its opening in 2015 for its innovative approach to the biography of Alexander Hamilton, best known (formerly) as George Washington’s Secretary of Treasury and the man whose face graces the US $10 bill. For the purposes of this essay, however, Hamilton is important for another reason: he was the primary architect and contributor to The Federalist, a “founding document” of the constitutional period, and as such he is one of those very specific (white, male, propertied) bodies to whom such documents can be traced. The popularity of Miranda’s show raises the question: what future is there for the sovereign, self‐invented subject of the liberal state once that position is revealed to have been a historical fiction? And what are we to do with Citizen Zero – the original rights‐bearing subject (epitomized historically by men like Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton) – whose universality has on one hand been exposed as an ideological ruse and yet whose place is so foundational to progressive history that he is now necessary to it?
The notoriously elitist Hamilton is an odd choice of hero for a popular Broadway show, especially one that celebrates the founding through a range of popular musical styles, most notably rap and hip‐hop. Miranda first had the idea for a hip‐hip concept album called The Hamilton Mixtape while on vacation in Mexico, where he was reading Ron Chernow’s hagiographic biography of Hamilton, which celebrates him (despite all those $10 bills) as the most misunderstood and overlooked of the founding fathers. Part of the phenomenon critics have dubbed “founders chic,” Chernow’s award‐winning biography was a bestseller even before Miranda adapted it. In fact, Miranda picked up his copy in an airport kiosk and was quickly enthralled by Chernow’s attempt to rehabilitate and restore Hamilton to prominence in the pantheon of national memory. Hamilton (the musical) ends, in fact, with a meditation on cultural memory, which is hailed as an engine not just for remembering and forgetting but for inclusion and exclusion within the larger body politic. “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” the chorus asks. “Every other founding father grows old, every other founding father’s story gets told” – so why not Hamilton’s? (Miranda and McCarter 2016: 11, 280–281).
But it is not just Alexander Hamilton’s story that Miranda wants to tell. In its most powerful and well‐known maneuver, the musical casts men of color, exclusively, in each of its major male American roles so that the historical Hamilton, Washington, Jefferson, Burr, and Madison are all played by performers of color. The performance thus places black and brown bodies at the center of its spectacle and allows them to do for white founding fathers the same things those white founding fathers have done, for so long, for everyone else: represent. Radical difference is not absent here but present, made available on stage for all to see in way that materializes rather than abstracts, particularizes rather than universalizes, and in this way Hamilton spectacularly expands the purview of Citizen Zero beyond the white body he happened to originally inhabit.
Miranda clearly sees Hamilton as a figure for everyman and every body. But Hamilton can perform this representative function for slightly different reasons than we might be used to. Other early national republicans (like Washington or Jefferson) claimed the right to stand in for every (other) body because of their putative ability to represent all interests, to stand as a universal signifier for all citizens everywhere. But Hamilton seems to appeal to Miranda (at least theoretically) for the opposite reason – because, as the most marginal of the founding fathers (according to Chernow), Hamilton stands on the cusp between inclusion and exclusion. Miranda thus instrumentalizes the historical Hamilton here, making him a representational vehicle for telling a particular kind of story about America and the making of Americans. In particular, he identifies with Hamilton’s identity as an immigrant, a person who is not born an American (through birthright citizenship) but becomes one in and through language: Hamilton’s appeal, for Miranda, is that he was “born a penniless orphan in Saint Croix, of illegitimate birth, became George Washington’s right hand man, became treasury secretary, caught beef with every other founding father, and all on the strength of his writing” (Obama White House 2009).
For this reason, Hamilton’s dramatic expansion of the US origin story happens not just at the level of casting but at the level of language, as Miranda stages various conflicts in Hamilton’s life as hip‐hip throwdowns, using black cultural forms to bring to life things like the debate over constitutional ratification, the 1790s debt crisis, and Washington’s post‐Revolutionary policy on international neutrality. Indeed, in the eighteenth‐century practice of dueling, a structuring device that recurs three times over the course of the performance, Miranda sees a historical precursor to the contemporary practice called battle rap, in which two rappers verbally duel – sometimes across albums, sometimes in person on stage (and then usually freestyle) – to see who has better rhymes. Indigenous to the US east coast and dating to the 1970s, battle rap is usually thought of as a remnant of old school hip‐hop and in Hamilton it blends seamlessly with more traditional musical forms, from Gershwin‐like show tunes to pop music, in scenes where men actually duel (with guns) but also in a series of Parliamentary(‐ish) showdowns among Washington’s cabinet members as they debate wonky policy issues, the likes of which Broadway has never seen. In such scenes, many of the founders’ actual words are plucked verbatim from the archive and inserted wholesale into the musical’s libretto, transcoded into mesmerizing raps that make the dead letter alive again for texts ranging from Washington’s Farewell Address to private letters between “A‐Dot‐Burr” and “A‐Dot‐Ham” (as the libretto styles Burr and Hamilton just before their final grudge match in Weehawken).
There is something undeniably pleasurable about the way Miranda’s raps make the founding feel present again, resurrected within a complex contemporary frame that is communicated both through casting and through the musical’s everyday diction. Indeed, Miranda’s salty rendition of early national life brings to mind the down‐to‐earth stylistic innovations of Common Sense. Just as Paine had called the King “a Brute,” Hamilton has Jefferson and Madison proudly self‐identify as “Southern mother‐fuckin’ / Democratic‐Republicans,” while Charles Lee is roundly denounced for having “shit[] the bed at the Battle of Monmouth” (200, 98). In embracing these crude colloquialisms, Miranda takes a side in one of the musical’s structuring debates, which pits the secretive, opaque Aaron Burr against the hotheaded but authentic Hamilton, who always transparently speaks his mind, no matter the cost. Burr’s advice to the young self‐destructive Hamilton – and eventually one of the more wistful refrains that wends its way throughout the score – is to “talk less, smile more” (24). But it is Hamilton’s inability to take this advice that sets him up as a foil to Burr – who will kill him at the end of act 2, as he did in 1804. In this poetic conflict, Burr always dissimulates, waiting to see which way the political wind blows before wading into public debates. Hamilton, on the other hand, always rushes into every fray, wearing his political heart on his sleeve.
These two political styles cut right to the heart of the republican dilemma described earlier in this essay. As words to live by, Burr’s credo “talk less, smile more” challenges the stability of representation – the idea that words and people can mean what they say, that one thing can unproblematically and transparently stand in for another. Thus it is in some ways to his credit that Miranda’s Hamilton cannot talk less and smile more, instead manically producing letters, speeches, and pamphlets that all too accurately describe his real thoughts, spewing words in print and in person in order to create a self, a legacy that points back to no one but him. As tensions mount between Burr and Hamilton, Burr notes that Hamilton writes like he’s ”running out of time,” “day and night,” “like it’s going out of style.” That same prolixity marks his performance, in act 2, at the Constitutional Convention, where he “Talks for six hours!” (“The convention is listless!”), leading members of the ensemble/convention to ask, while he’s speechifying, “Yo, who the eff is this?” (136–138).
Miranda almost always celebrates Hamilton’s penchant for speaking up, even when it alienates or turns self‐destructive. When it comes time to write The Federalist, for example, there’s a palpable outburst of admiration in the libretto for Hamilton’s heroic act of authorship, even if it is relayed through the envious point of view of Burr, whose words are amplified but also diluted by a constant echo from the chorus:
BURR: Alexander joins forces with James Madison and John Jay to write a series of essays defending the new United States Constitution,
entitled The Federalist Papers.
The plan was to write a total of twenty‐five essays,
the work divided evenly among the three men. In the end,
they wrote eighty‐five essays,
in the span of six months. John Jay got sick after writing five.
James Madison wrote twenty‐nine. Hamilton wrote the other fifty‐one!
BURR: ALL WOMEN:
How do you write like you’re
Running out of time? Running out of time?
Write day and night like you’re
Running out of time? Running out of time?
(Miranda and McCarter 2016: 138)
Despite the text’s admiration for Hamilton’s productive energy, the fevered production of The Federalist Papers was actually a problem for early American readers hoping for a more balanced debate about constitutional ratification. The Papers were, in their serialized pieces, overwhelmingly immense, ballooning, as the musical points out, from 25 projected numbers to 85. But more than this, the essays appeared in New York in what Michael Warner (1990) has memorably called “a barrage of print”: “Publius was not content simply to appear in print. Through various machinations, he was able to appear simultaneously in four newspapers in New York and another in Virginia, with occasional appearances elsewhere to boot – a strategy of blanketing the public space of print that was warmly resented by his opponents” (113). In keeping with Warner’s thesis about the generalizing function of printed texts in this period, he concludes that “Publius speaks in the utmost generality of print, denying in his very existence the mediation of particular persons” (113). But there is a second way to look at it, and New Yorkers, who felt the “barrage” more keenly than others, certainly articulated this view in their response to the series. Hamilton, himself a lifelong New Yorker with influence over lucrative government printing contracts, managed to place pieces of the essay series in not one newspaper but every New York newspaper he could convince or coerce to carry them. The effect was twofold: more face time for Publius with every sector of New York readers and, of course, less face time for Publius’ opponents, since there was limited space in the early American newspaper (when one voice took up a column of newsprint, it meant another couldn’t appear there). One group of New Yorkers was so incensed by this obnoxious attempt to foreclose their own right to speak that they lobbied Thomas Greenleaf (1788), the editor of the New‐York Journal, to ax the series, noting that Publius had discovered “a new mode of abridging the liberty of the press” by dominating its space.
Despite Miranda’s admiration for Hamilton’s tendency to talk more and smile less, he also implicitly acknowledges the zero‐sum logic of such speech acts, which (though honest, authentic, and self‐identical in a way Burr never is) nevertheless also prove at times exclusionary, allowing one voice to exclude others, rather than speaking for other absent or non‐speaking voices, as we might expect – or hope for – from a statesman like Hamilton (or Publius). In this particular song, the palpable margin of representation is gendered. As Hamilton and Burr debate the wisdom of The Federalist blitzkrieg, for example, a chorus explicitly marked as “ALL WOMEN” sing the number’s quizzical refrain: “Running out of time?” It’s unclear in this moment whether the line is meant to amplify Burr’s question (“How do you write like you’re / Running out of time?) or, quite the opposite, to destabilize it (as in: “Running out time? What do you mean, Burr, when you say running out of time?”). This is not a small problem. The question of whether two different points of view amplify or agonize each other goes right to the heart of the questions this essay has been about: who gets to speak in the voice of “everyone” (i.e. as and for “the people”) and is that “everyone” actually represented in such moments – or, by contrast, repressed, erased, eliminated? In the eighteenth century, women were legally represented in every way under the law of coverture by their fathers and husbands. This moment in the musical raises the question: are the women here echoing Burr’s point of view or do they occupy a radically separate point of view that can only be hinted at from the side of the stage?
The musical later explicitly uses the character of Eliza Schuyler, Hamilton’s wife, to take on the question of how women’s voices do and do not survive in the early American archive. In a remarkable solo titled “Burn,” a wronged (because cheated‐on) Eliza plainly states that the best revenge is erasure, or, in Dillon’s words, “social death.” Apostrophizing an absent Hamilton, she notes that “I saved every letter you wrote me,” and then proceeds to burn them onstage in a bonfire of marital rage:
You and your words, obsessed with your legacy […]
Your sentences border on senseless
And you are paranoid in every paragraph
How they perceive you
You, you, you. […]
I’m erasing myself from the narrative
Let future historians wonder how Eliza
Reacted when you broke her heart
You have torn it all apart
I am watching it
Burn
Watching it burn
The world has no right to my heart
The world has no place in our bed
They don’t get to know what I said
I’m burning the memories
Burning the letters that might hve redeemed you
[…]
I hope that you burn. (238)
In a sense, Eliza performs a liberal and literary version of the act of sati here: the ritual self‐immolation performed by a Hindu widow on the death of a husband and famously described by Gayatri Spivak in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). Here, Eliza is not (yet) a widow, but the “death” of her husband’s legacy inevitably leads to hers as well, since their future legacies are tied up in the same set of correspondence. To “burn” his letters is to burn her own, since their identities are merged in these documents and (by way of coverture) in their marriage: “I’m erasing myself from the narrative,” she declares, “Let future historians wonder how Eliza / Reacted when you broke her heart“ (238). This is Miranda’s attempt to grapple with Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton’s absence from her own story in the historical archive – the fact that none of her letters from this period survive, forcing historians like Ron Chernow to triangulate their accounts of the Hamilton marriage, and of Elizabeth’s life, from other sources. But the scene also speaks to the same representational crisis to which Spivak has devoted much of her career: the tricky way that representation might be said to blot out the thing it is meant to stand for. Here, the full force of that maneuver is felt in the brutal final line, which vaults over its own metaphor to arrive at a witheringly powerful death wish that fuses Hamilton with his now non‐existent archive of personal words: “I hope that you burn.”
Spivak has written explicitly about how representation works in the US constitutional context in ways that recall her earlier and better known arguments in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” but that also return us to the argument with which this essay began. In US culture, Spivak notes, authority is always “secured with reference to an origin‐story: the original documents left by the Founding Federalists, Reconstruction Republicans, New Deal Democrats” (1990: 135). At such moments, an “abstract” constitutional subject creates a kind of placeholder for future citizens, and when an originally excluded group, like women, eventually comes to inhabit this structural position, the effect is one of both gain and loss. The gain, of course, is that one becomes, at such a moment, a fully vested citizen, in this case an American with rights and privileges. But something is also lost, Spivak insists, when the very complicated and particular thing called, say, a woman (or women in the plural) is/are fully incorporated into the body politic. In such moments, Spivak insists, the liberal aspirant makes herself “part of a General Will by way of articles of ‘foreign’ – that is to say, gender‐alienated – manufacture.” Though pragmatic and strategic, such identifications with the abstraction of “Americanness” are not, for Spivak, an absolute good (or what progressives call progress). Instead, in a moment that hearkens back to her own earlier work on sati and that might point (for us) to Eliza Schuyler’s “Burn,” she likens the struggle for inclusion and representation to “playing […] with fire.” It is better, she insists, “to realize the responsibility of playing with or working with fire than to pretend that what gives light and warmth does not also destroy.” When previously excluded groups are retroactively written into constitutional history and afforded its guarantees of equal protection, it is “not an unquestioned teleological good but a negotiation with enabling violence” (146).
It is possible that if Spivak were to take in a matinee of Hamilton, she might find Miranda to be what she calls a “mere apologist” for the Constitution – someone who “use[s] its instruments to secure entry into its liberating purview” – but at a cost (147). Certainly, there are a growing number of scholars who have criticized the musical’s exclusion of historically black characters in favor of the great men who already grace the $1, $2, and $10 bills. For if the musical strategically undermines the whiteness of its historically white characters through its multiracial casting, it also fails to include any historically black characters, setting aside New York’s checkered multiracial past in favor of a more celebratory multiracial present. As Lyra Monteiro (2016) notes, one out of every five white households in eighteenth‐century New York owned slaves and 14% of New York’s population was black in the late eighteenth century (most of them enslaved) (93). But every major character in Hamilton is, to a man (and woman), historically white. There are no named or even speaking characters of color, no slaves nor freemen here, no Crispus Attucks, no Olaudah Equiano, no Toussaint Louverture, no Phillis Wheatley (to name a few of the more spectacularly notable black historical subjects from this period). The one tantalizing exception is an elliptical reference in the libretto to Sally Hemings – a woman owned by Jefferson and the mother of many of his (enslaved) children – who appears briefly, as a kind of spectral accompaniment to Jefferson when he arrives onstage at the start of act 2. As Monteiro notes, however, Sally has no lines and flits forward for only a few bars of a single song before melting back into the chorus. “Despite the proliferation of black and brown bodies onstage,” Monteiro concludes, “not a single enslaved or free person of color exists as a character in this play.” “Here,” she decries, “there is only space for white heroes,” an outrageous approach, she writes, in a world in which “black lives so clearly do not matter” (93, 96, 98).
In this way, Hamilton makes a tricky tradeoff. It embraces the official archive of the liberal nation‐state and places it, quite literally, in the hands of historically excluded populations who have not had equal access to its liberatory potential in the past. But in doing so, it also keeps that exclusionary tradition alive. This gradual expansion is the essence of the progressive liberal project, as it has been enacted across several centuries, one that continually rotates between an exclusionary premise and what we might call an inclusionary predicate. Liberalism, in other words, has always managed to survive: first, by not letting some people in, and then by changing its mind, when it most needs to, in order to expand and hence to survive. But it is in the nature of the nation‐state that it never lets every body in. As Judith Butler (2015) writes, “every determination of ‘the people’ involves an act of demarcation. […] [T]here is no possibility of ‘the people’ without a discursive border,” and that border “consigns to the background, to the margin, or to oblivion those people who do not count as ‘the people’” (5).
This is why Spivak (1990) cautions against seeing the history of inclusion (even within the popular narrative of civil rights history) as some sort of triumphant teleology. She advises a more “deconstructivist stance,” urging would‐be citizens to “critique a structure that one can not (wish to) inhabit” (146). Yet the curious innovation of Hamilton is that it makes visible a wish that is there – not one that isn’t or can’t be. In the end, Miranda’s genuine attachment to his source material recalls the work of queer theorist José Muñoz (1999), who, like both Spivak and Miranda, is most drawn to think about the person “who has been locked out of the halls of representation or rendered a static caricature there,” someone who has an “uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong” (1, 12). Miranda clearly identifies with Hamilton and encourages others to identify with him as well – as writer, as immigrant, as outsider, but also as founding father (or Citizen Zero). But identification “is never a simple project,” Muñoz warns. It is instead a “site of struggle” “fraught with intensities of incorporation, diminishment, inflation, threat, loss, reparation, and disavowal” (8, 6, 9). Given these high stakes, is it any wonder that some identify completely with the idea of the abstract constitutional subject while others run from the scene of citizenship in distress? Muñoz dubs those with (relatively) unambivalent responses to dominant cultural forms “Good” and “Bad” subjects (following the terminology of Marxist scholar Louis Althusser). A “‘Good Subject’ […] has an easy or magical identification with dominant culture […] [while] [a] ‘Bad Subject’ […] imagines herself outside of ideology,” rejecting it completely (12). But there is, Muñoz suggests, a third path, which he labels “disidentification,” and it is this one that most clearly resembles what we see in something like Hamilton, which (in Spivak’s words) chooses to play with the fire of liberal founding. For the disidentifying subject “tacitly and simultaneously works on, with, and against a cultural form,” like the nation‐state, print culture, or a staunchly elitist founding father. Such a person “works to hold on” to something that actively excludes him or her and “invest it with new life. […] To disidentify is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject” (12). At such moments – as when a black actor takes possession of Thomas Jefferson on an open public stage or another belts out Washington’s Farewell Address in the lyrical cadences of rap – “a representational contract is broken,” and “the social order receives a jolt that may reverberate widely and loudly” (6). In this way, the liberal representational contract of “we, the people” is under perpetual renegotiation, regardless of who did, or didn’t, write the line originally.
Hamilton embraces this middle ground – seeking out a moment in American history that both does and doesn’t speak for everyone – and it does so in a way that makes ambivalence look and feel like exuberance. In doing so, it stages a contemporary scene of “commoning” (to return to Elizabeth Dillon’s term) – so that the theater becomes once again (as in Dillon’s account) a physical space where the idea of social and national belonging can continue to be adjudicated, hundreds of years after the fact of founding (6). Thus, while some contemporary scholarship seeks to quit the question of belonging, Hamilton suggests why it may not be so easily quittable. The questions framed by founding remain, as Judith Butler has said, “temporally open” (6). Citizen Zero rises, falls, and inevitably returns, in an ongoing liberal loop we are not quite done reliving.
References
Further Reading
See also: chapter 23 (revolutionary print culture, 1763–1776); chapter 26 (performance, theatricality, and early american drama).