‘I Hate the Bus’: The dreamwork of the black feminist musical

This essay reads the 2003 Broadway musical Caroline, or Change to articulate a relationship between Black feminist aesthetics and the dreamwork of freedom struggle. Reading the I-want song ‘I Hate the Bus,' which the character Emmie Thibadeaux sings in the musical’s second act, I show that dreamwork—the term I use to describe the cultural work of representations of Black dreams that refract Black political longings through aesthetic and representational practices—reconciles fraught and contradictory longings for freedom. Through close analysis of the song, its staging, and scoring, I read the dreamwork performed in this moment as a form of defiance, one in which Emmie rejects the mandates circumscribing Black girls who dream of freedom. In short, I show that the Black feminist musical is a key site for thinking through the political possibilities of dreaming, through which we might reimagine political and social meanings of freedom, justice, and protest.