What about Cleopatra, anyway? The casting of Gal Gadot, an Israeli, to play the last Egyptian pharaoh in an upcoming film has drawn condemnation in the US, UK, Egypt, much of the Middle East and Africa. How did Gadot, a light-skinned woman, get to play Cleopatra? Now the casting of mixed-race British actor Adele James in a new Netflix documentary has sparked its own explosion. The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities went so far as to issue a statement: Cleopatra, it said, was light-skinned, not dark.
So is Cleopatra black or white? The answer is “neither”. These are terms that had absolutely no meaning in the ancient world, and are constantly changing meaning in our time. When Rishi Sunak was born, the British State categorized his ethnicity as ‘African Commonwealth’ and the UK Household Survey categorized him as ‘Mestizo’. He is now the UK’s first Anglo-Asian Prime Minister and, all things being equal, by the time he dies, his ‘race’, as far as British state and society are concerned, will likely have changed further. .
The Ptolemaic dynasty, of which Cleopatra was the last ruler, originated in Greece, although her mother’s origins are unknown. His sister’s skeleton, according to a 2009 BBC study, resembles that of an African. That said, maybe don’t give it too much thought: I recently discovered, thanks to some cool new optician technology, that I have Asian eyes, presumably from my Cape Malay grandfather.
As for Cleopatra, the bas-reliefs and statues represent someone not unlike the Egyptian women you might encounter today. She was not, in the modern sense of the word, “black”. Coupled with the fact that Cleopatra was the first member of the dynasty to speak Egyptian (her first language was Greek), this means that some see the last pharaoh as the dynasty’s first “true” Egyptian leader.
Today’s uproar is partly about how Egypt sees itself: an Arab country on the African continent with a tense and contested relationship with these two identities. The abuses targeting James are part of the same political trend that leads Tunisian President Kais Saied to claim there is a plot to replace Tunisia’s Arab population with migrants from sub-Saharan Africa.
But it is also a struggle for a Western identity that was born thousands of years after the reign of Cleopatra: darkness. William Shakespeare described her as “tawny”, the same word as founding father Benjamin Franklin, one of the first race theorists, would reach later, thinking it applied to parts of Africa and pretty much all of Asia. (The rest of Africa, he said, was black.)
“Darkness” became part of how the removal of rights – to the protection of property and the workplace, even to owning yourself – was justified for much of the modern era. In many parts of the world, “black” is something you really don’t want to be: note that the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities had less to say about the choice of a former Israel Defense Forces reservist in the role of Cleopatra than a half-breed Briton.
Given what being declared black has often meant to people, it’s no surprise that Egyptians reject it. They want their own story to be faithfully recorded and told. Consider the uneven new biopic The great George Foreman. Star, Khris Davis is darker skinned than boxer Foreman, just like James is darker skinned than Cleopatra. The difference is that Foreman, like all African Americans, is still grouped under the umbrella term “black”, which means that anyone who qualifies counts as a sufficiently accurate cast, just like the experiences of anyone under the black umbrella are considered. as contiguous to everyone. else inside.
The history of racial categories is, quite regularly, that they become more complicated and specific as people feel more comfortable. The UK is a more tolerant place than it was when Rishi Sunak and I were both considered ‘black’. No wonder most Egyptians have little to do with a label that can flatten identities into an amorphous mass.
In practice, what the representation of Cleopatra shows us is that whether or not you are “black” is decided by society, by the state and by the market. I can insist that I have Asian eyes, but I’m not going to persuade a Hollywood studio that I should star in a Gandhi biopic anytime soon.
I can point out that in fact most of my immediate genetic ancestors are a variation from the standard ‘white British’ administrative category to my heart’s content, but I’m still considered dark-skinned and therefore ‘black’ . And in a globalized world where more and more of us speak English, ultimately the question of whether or not you are black or white will, for better or for worse, be decided by an American.
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