Netflix’s Perverse Plutarch PasticheThat the Cleopatra series is being directed by Jada Pinkett Smith is enough to make anyone believe in karma.
Sumantra Maitra
Apr 22, 2023
I became aware of furious Greek and Egyptian op-eds about the forthcoming new Netflix series on Cleopatra VII Philopator after I had the misfortune of watching the trailer. It is almost comical. In it—I am not making this up—a woman of advanced age sagely opines that no matter what anyone tells you in school, her grandmother said that Cleopatra was black, and that’s that.
Following this, a petition started by two Egyptians began circulating, criticizing Hollywood’s “Afrocentrism” and calling for the preservation of the true history of both Greeks and Egyptians. Apparently, the phenomenon evinced by Netflix is now called “blackwashing”. Cleopatra, is also not the first or only woman to be “blackwashed”: Anne Boleyn and Queen Charlotte have also gotten the treatment. It gives “black history” a whole new meaning.
Cleopatra was, of course, not black. She was Ptolemaic Greek and Macedonian, the only ever Greek ruler (under Roman suzerainty) who managed to, at least vaguely, learn the native language of the land she ruled as a foreigner. She is therefore a figure close to both Greeks and Egyptians. Roman depictions of her show a proud and sculpted Grecian nose bridge, with pale skin and reddish hair, although that might just be bad dye in an old painting.
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The cause is simple. This is the ultimate endpoint of what I call the “1619 School of History.” Here, truth and facts have no meaning, and the only thing that matters is demonstrable power, usually over you, dear reader. It is, in simple words, falsifying history to create an alternate historical and artistic starting point, a year zero for the future generations to come.
That is why you see the desecration of Tolkien by Amazon in the name of diversity and representation, instead of new stories by new authors. This is why one can observe the co-opting of historical figures to destroy historical accuracy.
This keeps happening—and only in one direction—because of a simple reason. You possibly cannot see this slow artistic coloration by a very specific ideology, because it is all around you, from TV shows, to movies, to revisionist history books. And because this incessant revisionism is not talked about openly, the discussion is often underground and is often the domain of prejudiced animus.
But the reality is that this is far more subversive and banal at the same time. Historical revisionism is the ultimate refuge of ideological fanatics who want to distort history, and of unoriginal midwit bureaucrats in film and TV production who do it for money. We will not see Hugh Jackman playing Nelson Mandela. But we might see Whoopi Goldberg or Dylan Mulvaney, as a Twitter anon pointed out, someday playing the queen of Jhansi, or Hypatia, or Joan of Arc.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/netflixs-perverse-plutarch-pastiche/
