The new Netflix docudrama series »Queen Cleopatra,” produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith, has already sparked a passionate response, but perhaps not the one that publicists were hoping for. Since news broke that the series would star British actress Adele James, fans, Egyptologists, scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity and Arab And Greek media outlets question whether the series is deliberately distorting history. The reason? “Queen Cleopatra” depicts the legendary monarch in black.
Cleopatra, who died in 30 BC, remains a source of pride for disparate communities. Many contemporary Egyptians consider her a key figure in preserving their history and even as a model for contemporary Egyptian women. The Greeks also claimed her, pointing out that she was of Macedonian and Greek origin.
Depictions of dark-skinned Cleopatra date back at least hundreds of years. A Chronicle of the 14th century represents it in a sort of anthracite gray. Researchers have long debated though some references in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” suggest that the playwright thought she was dark-skinned. In contemporary American pop culture, this statement is often taken as fact, describing her as a beautiful and powerful black African queen, her name commonly referred to as such in hip-hop.
“Queen Cleopatra,” however, struck a chord internationally. The debate surrounding the docudrama intensified when an Egyptian lawyer called on Egyptian authorities to censor Netflix, accusing it of distorting “Egyptian identity.” Zahi Hawass, former Egyptian minister of antiquities, also entered the fray, claiming that a “lie” is “at the heart of this series.” “Cleopatra’s native language was Greek,” he wrote in an essay for Arab News, “and in contemporary busts and portraits she is clearly depicted as white.”
What debates like this forget is that current notions of race are relatively recent inventions and do not necessarily reflect how people in Cleopatra’s time saw the world or themselves. The classics tell us that although the Greeks and Romans noticed the color of the skin, they did not consider it as the main marker of racial difference. Other concepts – environment, geography, ancestral origin, language, religion, custom and culture – have played a more important role in demarcating groups and identities. So, whatever material a sculptor chose to use to invoke Cleopatra’s powerful face, there is no significant sense in which she – or anyone else of her era – would have identified as white.
The question that follows is: How, then, can anyone, including a Netflix dramatization, claim that Cleopatra was black?
Netflix’s casting was informed by the opinions of Shelley Haley, a renowned classicist and Cleopatra expert, who asserts that, although the evidence for her ancestry and physical attributes is inconclusive, Cleopatra was culturally Black.
Dr. Haley said she was struck by the experience, early in her life and career, of meeting black American communities who seemed to view Cleopatra as one of their own. Building on this experience, Dr. Haley’s academic work on Cleopatra adopts a more complex criterion of racial identification than skin color alone. “When we say, in general, that the ancient Egyptians were black and, more specifically, that Cleopatra was black,” Dr. Haley wrote, “we are affirming them as part of a culture and history that experienced oppression and triumph, exploitation and exploitation. survival.”
His point is that we are not limited to considering only depictions of what Cleopatra looked like or descriptions of her ancestry. We can also use what we know about his life, reign, and resistance to understand his race as a shared cultural identity.
So what exactly do we know?
Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII, was part of the family that conquered Egypt more than 200 years earlier. He was regularly described as an illegitimate child. Her mother is unknown, as is the identity of Cleopatra’s mother, although several clues suggest that she may be Egyptian, including Plutarch’s assertion that Cleopatra was probably the first Ptolemaic ruler to speak this language.
When the Roman poet Propertius described Cleopatra as queen whore (meretrix regina), he laced his misogynistic tirade with allusions to Egypt, such as the “noxious” city of Alexandria and the “yapping” Egyptian god Anubis. The intersection of Cleopatra’s race and gender resulted in a form of oppression that made her heritage and sexuality particularly dangerous. Regardless of her lineage or appearance, it is clear that Cleopatra’s actions were not seen as typical behavior of a Greek or Roman woman.
Throughout her reign, Cleopatra was also careful not to portray herself as a wife or wife, but rather as Isis, the great Egyptian goddess who raised her son alone, without her murdered husband, Osiris. Cleopatra was a pragmatist, doing what she had to do to survive, first aligning herself with Caesar, then Mark Antony, before fleeing Actium when the winds turned. Eventually, when it became clear that Octavian would let her live only to take her through Rome as a war captive, she committed suicide by poison.
Dr. Haley argues that Cleopatra’s experience was part of a history of oppression of black women. Reclaiming Cleopatra as black and choosing to now depict her as a black woman highlights this history – and is consistent with contemporary Egyptians or Greeks identifying with Cleopatra based on their own shared culture. Unlike racial ascriptions based on physical characteristics, which seek to divide people into rigid, recognizable categories, shared cultural claims can easily coexist.
Recognizing Cleopatra as culturally black is not the same as claiming that skin color no longer has meaning today – in the manner of recent figures like Rachel Dolezal And Jessica Krug, who claimed a cultural identity that was not theirs. In our society, race and racism are deeply linked to skin color and other inherited physical traits. We cannot understand modern forms of oppression without understanding how phenotypic difference contributes to them, and we cannot legitimately claim a racial history without having lived it.
Cleopatra lived it. And it is this experience, not his physical attributes, that should determine how we imagine his life.
Gwen Nally is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. Mary Hamil Gilbert is an assistant professor of classics at Mississippi State University.
Source photographs from bravo1954 and ilbusca, via Getty Images, and courtesy of Netflix.
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