Get Me to the Greek: The Death of Western Civilisation by Homeric Adaptation

I recently had the undoubtedly welcome opportunity to accost a Cantabrigian Homeric classicist and burden her with my clearly well-founded concerns that Christopher Nolan's decision to cast Lupita Nyong'o, an actress of Kenyan-Mexican descent, in the minor role of Helen in his adaptation of The Odyssey augured the very end of Western civilisation as we know it. I was, however, decidedly disappointed to discover that not only was she entirely unaware of this impending cataclysm, she regarded the whole thing with bemused indifference (classicists, am I right?).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyIZ9tiiN8I

Don't blink, you'll miss her...

“Well, Helen was Greek,” the blatantly befuddled scholar replied, “so she wouldn’t have been white.” Here, laid bare in the words of a Chinese classicist (that is, a classicist from China rather than one studying the Chinese canon; our language seems to struggle with such complexities), were the rickety social constructs loosely underpinning the entire debate. Further bolstering the point, she seemed rather more concerned to discover that Nolan had cast Matt Damon, a white (extremely white, almost pasty, you might say) actor of British-Nordic descent, in the lead role of Odysseus.

While this particular conceptualisation of race may seem inconceivable to modern Anglo-American (not to mention white South African) culture warriors opining online, it wouldn’t have been to their intellectual (I use the term loosely here) predecessors. Early American eugenicists Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, whose works inspired Nazi racial ideology and modern white supremacism, divided Europeans into Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean racial groups, and argued passionately for the protection of the Nordics from immigration, intermarriage, and imbalance in birth rates threatening their dominance.

If those fears seem oddly familiar it is because the only major alteration to this racist conspiracy theory over the past century or so has, somewhat ironically, been some light race switching. Those Alpines and Mediterraneans, once seen as an existential threat to the Nordics, have now been fully absorbed into one single happy master race called the “whites” and the danger they once posed has been delegated to the “non-whites”. It’s almost as if, far from being fixed in aspic, cultures are in fact complex and ever-changing, and only those ideas that can evolve along with them are likely to be preserved.

Indeed, as the hallowed halls of one of our oldest universities have found room for a Chinese classicist and the fresh perspectives she brings to the dusty old canon, perhaps we too can find room for a literary adaptation that, while not entirely conforming to our personal perceptions of the piece, nevertheless allows it to be preserved and passed on to an audience far beyond the Mediterranean, and indeed beyond the West itself. But then that's exactly what an agent under strict CCP directive* to bring about our civilisational collapse would want me to think.

As to what Nolan himself was thinking, I cannot say for certain. But I think one clue comes courtesy of a complaint I picked up on a visit to Aït Benhaddou, one of the production’s major filming locations. According to a villager I spoke with there, rather than supplementing local incomes with a little extra background work, the crew flew in supporting artists from up North, because the darker skin tone of the local Amazigh population was deemed insufficiently “authentic” for the director’s vision of ancient Greece.

* Chinese Communist Party Directive 47B: Accelerated Western Civilisational Collapse Through Homeric Adaptations