I think the debate over whether Hamilton is radical/transformative is basically identical to the debate over whether or not middlebrow media can be radical/transformative. Go with me here...

Middlebrow media has a lot of definitions, but it generally refers to high culture that is mediated for a wider audience, often with an improving/aspirational tone. Think Anna Karenina being chosen for Oprah's Book Club. Musical theatre is classic middlebrow culture.

Christina Klein offers excellent readings of Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals like The King and I in her book Cold War Orientalism, arguing that musical theatre was a medium through which shifting global politics could be expressed as sentimental problems.

So the soft imperialism of the United States appears in the form of Anna teaching the children of Siam about a new world map while singing about the pleasures of "getting to know you." The musical is doing political work here, while mediating it as spectacle. Classic middlebrow.

Some critics view the middlebrow primarily as a problem; it softens political critique by making it appetizing, and often believes that sentimental narratives can lead to social change, a claim that is extremely difficult to prove.

(Most people who want to claim that sentimental narratives cause social change point to Uncle Tom's Cabin, but James Baldwin and many critics who followed him argue that the novel is less about ending slavery than it's about making white people feel better about ourselves.)

BUT other critics have faith in the possibilities of middlebrow media leading to changing, especially because the middlebrow is often a site of mass culture, and mass culture facilitates mass conversations. Middlebrow texts become a shared vocabulary for working through problems.

Look at Harry Potter, a quintessential middlebrow property. Lots of folks are annoyed at how whole generations use these novels as a framework for understanding the world, but this shared vocabulary has allowed those generations to develop politically and ethically.

Hamilton is a work of middlebrow art that is also a mass cultural phenomenon. It translates the complexities of history and politics into a sentimental storyline, turning complex historical figures into likeable and meme-able characters along the way.

In doing so, it risks leaching the nuance out of how we talk about history, especially because it leaches nuance precisely in a way that makes middlebrow viewers feel good.

BUT as a mass cultural phenomenon, it provides a shared vocabulary for conversations about American history and how it grapples with race, gender, and power. It invests audiences through its sentimental storyline and affective charge, but investment is a starting point.

At the end of the day, middlebrow media can be good to think with -- but it can also arrest thought by creating an experience that feels like you're learning without asking much from you by way of engagement or critique.

A great question. Because the middlebrow is about mediation, something can BECOME middlebrow via how it's mediated, even if that wasn't its original purpose or context. Hamilton has become middlebrow via how we consume, use, and talk about it. https://twitter.com/sudhak/status/1279129140868739072?s=20

This is also really key. We can talk about how radical it is for historically minoritized culture to be integrated into the middlebrow, while also asking how that integration risks depoliticizing that same culture. https://twitter.com/michellecampos_/status/1279134739618643968?s=20

Feminist scholars (including myself) are constantly bumping up against the question of whether the middlebrow does feminist work, since the rejection of middlebrow culture is often a gendered rejection (middlebrow culture being feminized esp. via its sentimentality).

For me always comes back to the ambivalence of "why not both." We can acknowledge that it is important for Black authors to get picked up for high-profile book clubs, for example, while still recognizing that those book clubs tend to frame reading in a conservative way.

Anyway I fucking love Hamilton because my tastes are determinedly middlebrow and that's why I'm writing a book about my ambivalent relationship to sentimentalism /END THREAD