Whose Queen? Netflix and Egypt Spar Over an African Cleopatra.

NYT WORLD: Whose Queen? Netflix and Egypt Spar Over an African Cleopatra.
By Vivian Yee
Section: World
Source: New York Times
Published Date: May 10, 2023 at 03:00AM

Egyptians say the influential streaming service is dragging an ancient queen into a modern, and decidedly Western, debate — about Black representation in Hollywood — in which she has no real place.

On this much, at least, everyone can agree: Cleopatra was a formidable queen of ancient Egypt, the last of the Macedonian Greek dynasty founded by Alexander the Great, who went on to even greater posthumous fame as a seductress, immortalized by Shakespeare and Hollywood. Beyond that, many of the details are fuzzy — which is how one of the world’s dominant streaming services ended up in an imbroglio with modern-day Egypt recently, called out by online commenters and even the Egyptian government for casting a Black actress to play Cleopatra in the Netflix docudrama series “African Queens,” which airs on Wednesday. Soon after the show’s trailer appeared last month, Netflix was forced to disable comments as they turned into a hostile, and occasionally racist, pile on. Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, the government agency in charge of heritage, declared the show a “falsification of Egyptian history.” A popular television host accused Netflix of trying to “take over our Egyptian culture.” An Egyptian lawyer filed a complaint demanding that the streaming service be shut down in the country. For the show’s makers, the four episodes about Cleopatra were a chance to celebrate one of history’s most famous women as an African ruler, one they portray as Black. But for many Egyptians and historians, that portrayal is at best a misreading, and at worst a negation, of Egyptian history.

Read More at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/10/world/middleeast/cleopatra-netflix-race-egypt.html