Casting controversies revolving around actors' race are not a novelty in the current political climate. For years, ethnic minority groups have been underrepresented in film and TV in the US and other Western nations, and efforts to reverse this in recent decades have led to debates over the casting of ethnic minority, and especially black, actors in roles that some believed should have been reserved for white people. There is, of course, significant nuance to this debate- a person might have no particular issue with the casting of Halle Bailey as Ariel in Disney's live-action "The Little Mermaid" remake, or the casting of Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury in the Marvel cinematic franchise, despite both characters being depicted as Caucasian in appearance in the respective source materials, but still take issue with the race-and-gender-swapping of historical Norse leader Haakon Ericsson in Netflix's series "Vikings: Valhalla." The case with "African Queens," however, may be a little more complicated than those prior examples.
Tina Gharavi, the series' director, wrote an article yesterday in "Variety" defending the show against criticism:
Gharavi's response actually highlights some of the reasons why the casting in "African Queens" may actually be a more concerning sign than the other examples of race-casting controversies that I brought up previously. The first thing that should be highlighted is that "African Queens" is being presented as a documentary, or at least, a "docudrama." That means that it purports to be informative, and should therefore be held to a higher standard with regards to historical accuracy than a series or film explicitly marketed as entertainment only. This is the first issue that arises with Gharavi's comparison between her new series and the 1963 classic "Cleopatra," which featured white British-American actress Elizabeth Taylor as the titular character. The second is, of course, that Taylor's "Cleopatra" was released in the 1960s, an entirely different social era in which concerns about white actors playing ethnic minority roles were yet to gain mainstream traction. The big reason many people angered by Netflix's new documentary weren't angry about "Cleopatra" when it was released may well be that they weren't alive at that time.
The third issue is that contrary to Gharavi's assertions in her "Variety" article, Cleopatra may well have looked more like Elizabeth Taylor than Adele James. Cleopatra was, as mentioned above, a member of the ethnically Greek Ptolemaic dynasty. The latter was infamously endogamous, which is a nice way of saying that they were big on incest. The wider Greek population in Ptolemaic Egypt, who formed a semi-formal ruling caste above the majority of indigenous ethnic Egyptians, were also largely endogamous and generally married amongst themselves, remaining culturally and socially removed from the Egyptian population. Gharavi also notes that Cleopatra had ancestors from the "West Asian" Seleucid dynasty, which was actually another Hellenistic Greek dynasty descended from another of Alexander's generals, Seleucus I Nicator. In other words, from what we know Cleopatra was probably primarily ethnically Greek, with some Persian ancestry through the Seleucids. Whilst Greeks are generally not as light-skinned as Elizabeth Taylor, they are undoubtedly European and one would be unlikely to mistake a Greek for a sub-Saharan African. There is an element of uncertainty, however, in that Cleopatra's mother's identity is unknown; this makes it at least possible that she was "black," i.e. of recent sub-Saharan African ancestry. That would be a longshot, though- and despite Gharavi's assertions, from what we know of the self-image of the Hellenistic monarchs, Cleopatra's family would very much have identified themselves as "Greek," though perhaps not entirely to the exclusion of being "Egyptian" in some sense as well.
There are plenty of little historical misconceptions scattered throughout Gharavi's article. The real meat of the issue, though, is alluded to in the following part of Gharavi's article: "While shooting, I became the target of a huge online hate campaign. Egyptians accused me of “blackwashing” and “stealing” their history. Some threatened to ruin my career — which I wanted to tell them was laughable. I was ruining it very well for myself, thank you very much! No amount of reasoning or reminders that Arab invasions had not yet happened in Cleopatra’s age seemed to stem the tide of ridiculous comments."
Here is why I find this documentary so concerning as to be worthy of an NSG thread. It would be one thing if the documentary simply cast a mixed-race actress as Cleopatra because a suitable Egyptian or Greek actress was unavailable, or deliberately pursued a "race-blind" approach to casting. But from what I've seen about this documentary, it seems to be explicitly making the case that not only was Cleopatra actually "black," but so were the ancient Egyptians as a people- as Gharavi indicates with her line about the Arab invasions "not having happened yet." This is in line with an Afrocentrist revisionist version of history in which the ancient Egyptians were a black sub-Saharan African people, who were exterminated or assimilated by the invading Arabs from the 7th century onwards. In this version of history, modern Egyptians are largely the descendants of the Arab "invaders," and therefore "imposters." In reality genetic studies using material from ancient Egyptian mummies have generally shown that the Egyptians of today are, genetically speaking, more or less the same people as the Egyptians who built the pyramids- indeed, it seems that modern Egyptians generally have more sub-Saharan African gene markers than their ancient counterparts, suggesting that the greater part of the sub-Saharan African heritage of modern Egypt was introduced after the pharaonic age had ended. The material evidence in the form of ancient Egyptian art corroborates this, as the Egyptians typically present themselves as darker in coloration than the Greeks to the north, and lighter than the Nubian people of the Kingdom of Kush to the south.
Of course, in reality Egypt was not perfectly homogenous, and it's likely that then, as now, there was an element of the Egyptian population who could have passed as sub-Saharan African- particularly in Upper Egypt, where there was likely intermixture with the Nubian population to the south. Likewise, Lower Egyptians would likely have a greater proportion of Near Eastern ancestry given their proximity to the Levant, and some may have been quite fair. Famously, Pharaoh Ramesses II is believed to have had red hair. But Egypt was not some lost black civilisation. Gharavi complains about "Amir in his bedroom in Cairo," but Amir might have good reason to feel angry. The Afrocentrist narrative that Gharavi's documentary is pushing essentially appropriates his people's history whilst accusing them of being imposters with no true claim to the legacy of their ancestors. It's similar to racially motivated theories by colonial era Europeans that the African metropolis of Great Zimbabwe must have been built by non-Africans, or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that Ashkenazi Jews are in fact imposters descended from the Turkic Khazars rather than the ancient Hebrews. There is a significant difference in that those "theories" were developed by socially dominant groups to maintain their ideology of superiority, whilst the Afrocentrist narrative about ancient Egypt instead emerged from the desire of a historically marginalised and oppressed people to associate themselves with a recognisable and glorious history as a form of self-affirmation; but regardless of motivation, the Afrocentric narrative is inescapably a distortion of history driven by politics and racism. Ancient Egypt is the heritage of everyone, but it is also particularly the heritage of the Egyptian people, and it is morally unacceptable for another group to attempt to appropriate that history.
So what we are left with is a situation where a major streaming platform with over 230 million subscribers worldwide as of January this year is now producing documentaries that seem to be promoting racist conspiracy theories. To me, this is both hard to believe and extremely worrying.
