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29 “The World Turned Upside Down”: Hamilton and Deconstruction
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Published:October 2020
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Abstract
This chapter looks at Lin Manuel Miranda's Hamilton: An American Musical through the lens of Jacques Derrida's approach to textual interpretation, commonly known as deconstruction. Taken together, the play's text, music, casting, and staging offer a master class in teasing out antimonies — contradictions between two incompatible beliefs or conclusions — and in so doing set forth counternarratives that complicate audience understandings of America's Founding and reframe modern cultural and artistic hierarchies. Jack Balkin identifies two deconstructive practices applicable to legal interpretation, each of which Hamilton employs in interpreting history: the inversion of hierarchies and the liberation of text from the author. As to the first, deconstruction seeks to identify “hierarchical oppositions” in a given text, then invert them. The temporary inversion is meant not to establish a new privileging, but rather “to investigate what happens when the given, 'common sense' arrangement is reversed.” This investigation serves as “a means of intellectual discovery, which operates by wrenching us from our accustomed modes of thought.”
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