BackStage tackles the "racebending" of Cleopatra

[whosdamike]

BackStage tackles the "racebending" of Cleopatra

http://backstage.blogs.com/espresso/2010/06/angelina-jolie-is-not-african.html

...she was black on Broadway in the person of Leslie Uggams in “Her First Roman” as far back as 1968. But Hollywood’s ability to turn a deaf ear to such complaints is well documented and doesn’t appear to be changing.

Comments

[rmg]

The issue of Cleopatra's race and ethnicity is pretty complicated, so I'm just going to recycle a long comment I wrote from some other conversation about this movie:

I mean, there’s certainly a lot of controversy and ambiguity over the racial characteristics of the Ancient Egyptians themselves, stemming from the 19th century European tendency to take credit for everything ever (See also the Great Zimbabwe clusterfuck where a bunch of archaeologists assumed that a bunch of white people clearly randomly appeared in the middle of Zimbabwe to build a huge city since obviously it couldn’t have been Africans who did it) and the highly stylized nature of Egyptian art (the dark tones male figures were painted in and the pale ones females were painted in having more to do with ideal gender roles then literal depictions of appearance, etc., etc.). Joyce Tyldesley’s Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt, which I assume reflects current scholarship since it’s from 2008, points out that throughout Ancient Egyptian history the country was open to immigration from Libya, Nubia (Hi King Taharqa! You rule! Um, literally.), Asiatics, or wherever, so (to quote), and most foreigners who came to Egypt were assimilated into the wider population, “the Egyptian people showed a diverse range of racial characteristics, with red-headed, light-skinned Egyptians living alongside curly haired, darker-skinned neighbours.”

All of this is mostly (but not totally I guess but I’ll get to that in a second) irrelevant to Cleopatra and her Ptolemaic buddies, though. It's not quite accurate to say that they were Greek, since Ptolemy I was actually a Macedonian, although the Macedonian elites of this period (but not the Greeks) thought of themselves as true Greeks. The Ptolemaic family tree doesn’t branch a whole lot, since the two things the Ptolemies loved most of all were marring siblings to stabilize the growth of the Royal Family and then proving this strategy hilariously wrong by murdering one another anyway, but Berenice II was Lybian and Cleopatra I was part-Persian.

Cleopatra’s mother is thought to be Cleopatra V, a Ptolemy. Tyldesley points out this could be wrong and her mother could be “an elite woman from anywhere in the Hellenistic world”, but given the structure of Alexandrian society probably Greek or Egyptian so those were the Alexandrian elites. If her mother was “Egyptian” that could mean she looked like anything from Nubian King Taharqa to the mysteriously red-haired Rameses II. Her paternal grandmother, and maternal grandmother (if she was even a different person form her paternal grandmother- oh, those wacky Ptolemies) and grandfather are also unknown and could be from anywhere in the Classical world.

So anyway Cleopatra, as the product of a Greek-speaking froth of mudering incestuous foreign conquerers of Egypt, is “somewhere between 25 per cent and 100 per cent of Macedonian extraction”, with the rest possibly Egyptian or possibly Greek or anywhere else in the classical world. Combined with the fact that “Egyptian” itself is such a mix of various ethnicities we really can’t be sure just what she looked like.

Does this mean that Angelina Jolie is an appropriate casting choice for Cleopatra? I dunno. But given what is and isn’t known about Cleopatra’s ethnicity by modern Egyptologists this isn’t exactly Great Zimbabwe being yonked away by some Europeans when they took a liking to it. And it's not really like Avatar, either, where clearly non-white characters who are part of clearly non-Western cultures are played by white actors.

Anyway, why make a movie about Cleopatra anyway? They should make one about Hashepsut or something! She was actually Egyptian, and she owned.

[evewithanapple]

They should make one about Hashepsut or something! She was actually Egyptian, and she owned.

But then they couldn't make it all about her relying on Teh Menz!

[rmg]

19th and early 20th century Egyptologists made Hatshepsut's narrative all about the men in her life-- she was an evil stepmother who was stealing Thutmose III's rightful throne, all of the strings were being pulled by her dastardly vizier Senenmut, etc., etc. Modern Egyptologists know better, of course.

So what I'm saying is that Hollywood is as backwards and sexist and racist as a bunch of dead Victorian dudes. :V