When Netflix released the docudrama miniseries Queen Cleopatra in May 2023, controversy quickly arose around the casting of Adele James—a mixedrace English actor with Jamaican ancestry—as Cleopatra. Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities issued a long public statement in rebuke of the eight-episode series. Cleopatra, the ministry argued, was in fact a Macedonian Greek woman, “light-skinned” and possessing “Hellenic features.” Zahi Hawass, one of the country’s most famous archaeologists and twice its antiquities minister, adamantly maintainedthat Cleopatra was not Black. And Mustafa Waziri, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Archaeology, argued that the portrayal of the queen by a Black actor was nothing less than a “falsification of Egyptian history and a blatant historical fallacy.”
Many Egyptians view their history as distinct from that of subSaharan Africa, so the ministry’s response was perhaps not surprising-even though today, a couple of decades into the 21st century, one would be hard pressed to find any reputable social scientist who argue that race is a biological the insistence on Cleopatra’s whiteness seemed curious for the very reason that the queen’s race is unknown.
