Netflix’s drama about the Egyptian queen highlights how ideas of race have evolved
n 1751, the great American polymath Benjamin Franklin worried about the small number of “purely white People in the World”.. Asia chiefly tawny... And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also.” Only “the Saxons… [and] the English make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.”
Born in Alexandria in 69BC, Cleopatra VII, the last queen of the Ptolemaic Hellenistic dynasty, was an Egyptian ruler of Macedonian heritage, and possibly with a Persian and black African background too,. The casting of James as Cleopatra has, however, as much to do with contemporary sensibilities as with historical fact.
. For a people enslaved and oppressed, and living within a racist world that loudly proclaimed they had come from a continent with no history, the lure of Egypt, and of Cleopatra, as black was often irresistible.by Martin Bernal, a British scholar of Chinese political history, brought this discussion into both academia and wider public consciousness.
There is nothing wrong in casting Cleopatra as black. The problem lies in the resonances that flow from that
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