Minds of the South

It is, by now, well known that Atticus Finch, beloved hero of the late Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, is revealed to be a segregationist in Lee’s recently published novel Go Set a Watchman.

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“Hamilton”

In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.”  The United States has brutalized not only the black body but the indigenous body, simultaneously denying these people, along with women and non-Anglo immigrants and their descendants, the full rights of citizenship. Since the late 1960s, it has been commonplace for the arts to highlight American hypocrisy.  And so, hearing, in the age of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, of a hip-hop musical about the American Revolution and the early days of the Republic, written by and starring  a Latino-American with African American actors playing most of the second leads, one might reasonably assume that such a play would drip with irony.  One might anticipate raps about the three-fifths clause and property requirements for voting, eleven o’clock numbers by displaced Shawnee, and choruses sung by Sally Hemmings’ children.  One would be wrong.

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“Selma” vs. LBJ

In 1991, Oliver Stone slandered Lyndon Johnson in his film JFK, accusing Johnson of complicity in the assassination of President Kennedy. A number of historians and political figures (including Johnson Aide and Carter Administration Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph A. Califano, Jr.) have argued that Ava DuVernay’s new movie Selma defames LBJ as reluctant to send Congress a voting rights bill and as opposed to the Selma voting rights campaign.

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Politics and Theater

In 2007, in the midst of a glut of anti-Iraq-War plays, experimental theatre venue P.S. 122 presented the most challenging piece of political theatre that I’ve seen performed in New York in my lifetime: Young Jean Lee’s Church.

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Rock ‘n’ Roll

Addressing the United States Congress in February 1990, newly-elected Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel said his “one great certainty” is that “consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim.” It is this idea that is debated and ultimately upheld in Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll.

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