Disorienting Cleopatra: A Modern Trope of Identity

Kiluanji Kia Henda, The Merchant of Venice (2010). Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery

The name "Cleopatra" provokes passions of all kinds. One of the notso-minor passions concerns her looks and, by implication, the issue of her origins and identity. What did the ancient queen look like? Was she hauntingly beautiful? Was she white or black? Was she of Macedonian Greek or Egyptian ancestry? Emphatic and categorical answers to these questions would suggest a scientific hubris about the very possibility of possessing "Historical Truth" in general, and more specifically, about a complete cognitive mastery concerning Cleopatra and her world. No matter how science might strive for objectivity, history, as we have come to recognize, involves not only facts but also narratives, discourses, and worldviews. Unlike a certain postmodernism, however, this essay does not nihilistically profess the impossibility of access to any "fact" or "truth" (in non-capital letters). Throughout my work I have tried to inquire into how facts are established and how they are juxtaposed with other facts and narrated as a part of a larger narrative complex. Fragmentary and situated, scientific knowledge must rely partially on interpretation and on the "reading" of facts. Any look at the past within this conjuncture must be correlated with issues of worldview, particularly Eurocentrism, and the discourses shared by the "readers" of history.

Here I will examine contemporary writings that attempt to dispel the mystery surrounding Cleopatra's looks and origins. Engaging with the subject of Cleopatra almost necessarily entails addressing the question of image making and visual representation. For millennia, her story of love and death, of power and sexuality, of domination and subordination, and of the imperial intercourse between Greek, Egyptian, and Roman civilizations has excited the popular imagination, triggering passionate opinions about her identity. The historical and the fantastical have mutually nourished each other. The uncertainty about her looks, meanwhile, has allowed each generation to shape her image in the form of its desire. Each age, one might say, has its own Cleopatra, to the point that one can study the thoughts and discourses of an epoch through its Cleopatra fantasies. The ancient queen therefore constitutes more than a historical figure who can be relegated to the domain of archaeology and Egyptology; rather, she allegorizes highly charged issues having to do with sexuality, gender, race, and nation, issues that reach far beyond the geocultural space of her time. Here I will largely focus on the representation of Cleopatra over the past century, as it became enmeshed in the heights of imperialism as well as in the subsequent emergence of postcolonial nations and their diasporas. Locating the battle over her looks and origins within colonial domination, anticolonial struggles, and postcolonial racial frictions, as I will try to show, adds yet another dimension for comprehending the investment in Cleopatra's identity.

To engage contemporary debates over Cleopatra in depth, one must take her representation in popular culture seriously. Written within a cultural studies framework, this essay insists on the importance of "reading" Cleopatra within modernity, and especially in the context of mass media technologies. Since the late nineteenth century, Cleopatra has emerged as a mass-mediated figure. She has been visualized, evoked, or alluded to in numerous photographs, postcards, films, advertisements, commercials, television series, fashion magazines, and websites. Recently, for example, Cleopatra appeared in the futurist TV series Cleopatra 2525, in which an exotic dancer named Cleopatra, frozen in the year 2001, wakes up five centuries later and courageously battles to reclaim the surface of the earth for mankind from evil creatures known as Baileys. The advent of the various media technologies—film and television, video and digital—has in no way diminished the passion for the ancient queen. Cleopatra's image-making industry has achieved a remarkable global dissemination, to the point that her image has infiltrated households across the most diverse cultural geographies.

Cleopatra Between Eurocentrism And Afrocentrism

In The Search for Cleopatra (1997), Michael Foss summarizes Cleopatra's background:

The grandmother of Cleopatra was a concubine; her mother is not known...