Afrocentrism in the Public Eye: An Appraisal-Corpus Based Analysis on Netflix’s “Queen Cleopatra” Documentary

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Modern University for Technology and Information (MTI)

Abstract

Netflix’s “Queen Cleopatra”, released in May 2023, is a documentary that has raised controversy as it represents Queen Cleopatra, who has Greek heritage, as black African, which supports the Afrocentric claims about the “Black” identity of ancient Egypt. Afrocentrism is a movement that not only believes in the rejection of the white race in Africa, it also sponsors claims that modern Egyptians have nothing to do with the ancient Egyptian civilization history. Moreover, they assert that light-skinned Egyptians are descendants of Arab and European intruders. Although filmmakers try to enforce the ideology of Afrocentrism by choosing an actress with African dark-skinned features, and by classifying it as a documentary, not a soap drama, it was poorly received by the mass audience and considered “rotten” as the series has an audience score of just 2%. The rationale of analyzing these comments stems from the importance of magnifying the power of popular sentiment, reflected in the audiences’ comments; it serves as a crucial bridge between the filmmakers' intentions and the actual impact of the film on its target audience. Accordingly, this paper digs deeper in analyzing the vast majority of comments posted on the Rotten Tomatoes website from May to November 2023 quantitatively using KH Coder 3 program and qualitatively using Martin and White’s Appraisal framework (2005). The results show that most of the audiences are aware of the inconsistencies between film portrayals and historical reality to the extent that Netflix restricted comments on the trailer and faced calls for boycotts.

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Hend Abdelsalam Kandel is an Assistant Professor at MTI, she teaches critical thinking and foundation courses to students across most university faculties. Within the master's and PhD programs in linguistics, her research focuses on the intersection of mass communication, media, and linguistic analysis. Dr. Kandel holds both her PhD and master’s degrees in Linguistics from Ain Shams University. A CCTFEl certified graduate of the American University in Cairo (AUC), She actively shares her expertise as a speaker at numerous conferences.

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