Watching Queen Cleopatra felt like witnessing the death of scholarship

The most controversial aspect of Netflix’s new drama-documentary Queen Cleopatra – not least in Egypt – was the casting of a black actress, Adele James, in the title role. After all, one of the few things that seems certain about Cleopatra’s early life is that she was a Macedonian Greek. Luckily, though, the show had a powerful counterargument to this awkward and Eurocentric fact. As the African-American professor Shelley P. Haley put it with a QED-style flourish, back when she was girl, her beloved (if uneducated) grandmother once said to her: ‘I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black.’

And of course, given the series’ entirely unhidden agenda, being a black woman also means that Cleopatra ‘ruled with unparalleled power’, ‘bowed to no man’ and was basically great at everything. In the talking-heads sections, we were assured again and again what a strong and empowered feminist she’d been.