Casting Black Athenas: Black Representation of Ancient Greek Goddesses in Modern Audiovisual Media and Beyond

Abstract

This article focuses on Black representations of Greco-Roman goddesses in film and on television, exploring the historical and ideological conditions which have allowed audiences to react neutrally or favorably toward such representations. Adopting the transmedial perspective, the intersecting forces that have gradually disjointed conceptions of the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology in popular culture and imagination are considered. Such forces include nonspecialist understandings of ancient gender and its artistic interpretation, race versus colorism, and the commodity culture of cinema. Some portrayals of Black goddesses examined in this article appear in works imagineered or influenced by Disney: Hercules (1997 film, 1998–1999 animated series), The Little Mermaid (1989 film, 2008 Broadway musical) and Once Upon a Time (2011–2018 television series), whereas others appear in Syfy’s The Magicians (2015-2020 television series) and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson (2010 film and the upcoming television series). Casting Black women as Greek goddesses gradually weakens the conceptual entanglement between the Whiteness and the Greco-Roman divine, priming audiences to accept alternative representations of deities through cultural accretion.

Keywords:

• classical reception
• Disney
• fantasy
• intersectionality
• race

THE BLACK MUSES OPEN THE WAY

Once Upon a Time (ABC) Season 4, 2014–2015. Shown: Key Art.

Photo courtesy of ABC/Photofest.

Disney’s first foray into myth-making with 1997’s Hercules (dir. Ron Clements and John Musker) incidentally introduced Black female divinity into mass media via animating the Muses as Black, priming audiences worldwide to accept Black women in mythical stories. The framing device of Hercules has the entire story told by a band of five gospel-singing Black Muses (Calliope/Lillias White, Clio/Vanéese Y. Thomas, Thalia/Roz Ryan, Terpsichore/LaChanze, and Melpomene/Cheryl Freeman). The Muses appear to follow the prescriptive paradigm of rules for the ways that Blackness should interact with Whiteness and gender. A band of songstresses, the Muses tell the stories, not interfere in them—except in the matter of love, a feminine realm, where they help a White heterosexual couple accept their feelings for each other, evoking the trope of “Black Enchantment” and its links with music and magic (Cyrino 127). Sassy and alluring, they attract the masculine gaze, with plump Thalia expressing her lust for Hercules (paralleling eroticized stereotypes of Black women; see hooks, Black Looks 61–77).

Although the creators code them racially to strengthen gospel/Black Enchantment associations, their presence can be read positively, with their natural skin color connoting agency among the passive majority of deities. Among divine characters in the film, only the Muses, Zeus, and Hercules have natural skin tones: all the remaining gods glow with shades of rainbow, milling in the background and never interfering in the unfolding story, save for fiery-headed, gas-blue Hades. If we accept that Hercules associates natural skin colors with an active role in the narrative, then the Muses play a minor yet significant role: Black goddesses stand out among multicolored deities of Hercules because they frame the narrative as semi-participatory storytellers. Beatrice Frasl notes that Disney films, “work both with and against feminism, in that [they] … [represent] a complex entanglement of feminism and antifeminism, of conservatism and emancipatory elements” (354). The same duality underpins their approach to race, with Disney films simultaneously projecting progressive and regressive ideas. However, the sheer allure and popularity of the Hercules Muses enduringly shifted the image of a Black Greek goddess in popular imagination, with subsequent reimaginings capitalizing on their appeal.

“The sheer allure and popularity of the Hercules Muses enduringly shifted the image of a Black Greek goddess in popular imagination, with subsequent reimaginings capitalizing on their appeal.

Hercules (1997). Directed by Ron Clements, John Musker. Shown: Hades (voice James Woods), Megara (voice Susan Egan).

Photo courtesy of Disney/Photofest.

The characters of Muses undergo further development in Hercules: The Animated Series (1998–1999), a spin-off expanding the story by depicting Hercules’ awkward teenage years in an anachronistic Athenian high school. In “Hercules and the Muse of Dance,” clumsy Hercules is volunteered for the school dance; Terpsichore takes pity on a despairing hero and manifests in Athens to teach him how to dance despite other characters deriding dancing as unmanly. Giving a greater prominence to Black goddesses and bending the boundaries of Black expression, the series solidified the Muses’ place in the cultural imagination. The Black Muses of Hercules eventually proved influential enough to inspire Lizzo and Cardi B’s music video for their hit single “Rumors” (August 13, 2021). Directed by Tanu Muino, the video heavily references Disney’s Hercules, with two singers playing the Muses on a postmodern set inspired by ancient Greece. Lizzo and Cardi B reenvision Hercules as a truly Black reception, one which disrupts the male gaze through a particular association with Lizzo’s Thalia and her reclaimed body positivity. Although Lizzo is building on a long history of Black classicisms (Dhindsa and Stovall), the comprehensibility of the video to a broad audience is based upon the accretion of images of Black and other non-White goddesses in popular culture catalyzed by Hercules’ Muses, resulting in a reading of the video as celebratory rather than denigratory toward the classical world.

PROBLEMATIZING DIVINE RACE AND GENDER ON SCREEN: SOME THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Hercules’ positive yet nuanced story of naturalized diversity in ancient-world audiovisual media does not capture the full picture and demands sustained interpretive effort. Although “Black” as a category does not equate all identity categories that fall outside of Whiteness, it is a focal point for this analysis since Black men seem to elicit the strongest reactions from audiences in major roles in ancient world television and film, being perceived as unfit to play Greek gods regardless of their acting merits (Maurice, “Delineating” 27). As may already be apparent, audiences in the global North react very differently to men and women of color cast in roles of Greco-Roman divinities, with men of color often facing vehement opposition in such roles. This article aims to examine this disparity and offer an interpretation as to why it occurs. It is argued that conceptions of the male- and female-coded deities of Greco-Roman mythology have gradually become disjointed in popular culture and popular imagination, with divergent outcomes for those who depict them on screen. The cumulative effect of palimpsestic images of deities and other characters in mythology, accreting across different instantations in media, has resulted in the gap between audience reactions to the casting of Black men and Black women in film and television roles.

The Little Mermaid (1989). Directed by Ron Clements. Shown from left: Ursula (voice of Pat Carroll), Ariel (voice of Jodi Benson).

Photo courtesy of Buena Vista Pictures/Photofest.

This article draws from intersectional feminist and media-conscious narratological approaches to examine non-White depictions of Greco-Roman gods and goddesses in select film and television franchises. Expanding upon Deborah Lyons’s concept of what we call an intersectional interaction grid (77–102), it examines how race and gender could predicate conceptualizations of ancient deities in modern media franchises. In a similar vein, the perspective of transmedial storytelling (see Thon 2015) is adopted to investigate divine portrayals across different media but apparently within the same (or related) storyworld. One storyworld examined in this article includes works imagineered or influenced by Disney: Hercules (1997 film), Disney’s Hercules: The Animated Series (1998–1999), The Little Mermaid (1989 film), and ABC’s Once Upon a Time (2011–2018 TV series). Two other storyworlds discussed below are Syfy’s fantasy television series The Magicians (2015–2020, based on the 2009 novel of the same name by Lev Grossman) and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson franchise (Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, a 2010 action fantasy film by 20th Century Fox, and the upcoming Percy Jackson and the Olympians Disney + series).

The first key concept for this article, intersectional interaction grid, comes from Deborah Lyons’s Gender and Immortality. The author proposed a gendered interaction scheme for ancient Greek myth: Lyons framed relationships between gods, goddesses, men, and women as an intersectional interaction grid and highlighted how gender and (im)mortality predicate these relationships (77–102). Acknowledging the patriarchal nature of Greek myth, Lyons ordered the aforementioned character classes according to their social rank, from gods to goddesses to men to women. The classification places goddesses in the ambivalent middle position, a locus of intersectional potential. Subordinate to gods yet immortal, fertile, and potentially subversive, goddesses have the greatest range of roles to play in the mythical storyworld (protectresses, antagonists, neutral enablers, mothers, lovers, etc.). The following analysis reads non-White castings of Greco-Roman divinities through the interpretive lens of Lyons’s interaction grid, adding race as another salient category besides gender and (im)mortality. The ambivalent social standing of the goddesses in the Greek mythic storyworld affords them a measure of flexibility against modern audiences’ expectations. If the said goddesses are played by Black actresses, this intersectional ambivalence largely protects these portrayals against the audiences’ backlash and allows them to transcend the common “damsel in distress” script. This is especially true of the goddesses whose interactions with male characters are not necessarily based around gendered normative behavior.

“The ambivalent social standing of the goddesses in the Greek mythic storyworld affords them a measure of flexibility against modern audiences’ expectations.

The second key concept for this analysis, the storyworld approach, offers unique opportunities when studying representations of female-coded Greco-Roman deities across a gamut of media. First, both the Greek mythological imaginarium and modern media franchises have shown themselves receptive to the storyworld approach, since it underscores their polyphony, plurimediality and accretive efflorescence. Sarah Iles Johnston reframed the Greek mythos as a storyworld, i.e., a polyphonic yet semi-coherent mental universe in which numerous narratives, directly connected or not, coexist and unfold (122–30). Other narratologists have applied the storyworld framework to a number of modern transmedial franchises such as A Song of Ice and Fire, Walking Dead, Harry Potter, or Star Wars (Thon 34–39). Fictional characters within such a storyworld, reimagined by a number of creators, frequently differ from work to work in some aspects (polyphony), appear in a variety of narratives and media (plurimediality), and an audience’s impression of them “gradually accrues traits from some or all of those instantiations” (accretion; 26–27). The franchises we chose to interpret in this article draw more or less freely from a number of world mythical traditions, show clear debts to the Greek mythological imaginarium, and, more significantly, test the limits of the White-normative visual culture by casting women of color as Greek goddesses. In doing so, they gradually weaken the conceptual link between the Whiteness and the Greco-Roman divine, priming audiences to accept alternative representations of goddesses through cultural accretion.

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, BLACK APOLLO, AND ACCRETION OF BLACKNESS

The reception of Greco-Roman deities and heroes when portrayed as or by non-White people depends on the perceived importance (or salience) of the portrayed character. This dependence is well illustrated in a 2011 Saturday Night Live sketch (season 37, episode 5), featuring bearded and toga-clad Jason Sudeikis as Zeus. The SNL sketch encapsulates the dominant attitude toward non-White divine media portrayals, featuring two Black men: Kenan Thompson (briefly) as Eros and Jay Pharoah (more substantially) as Apollo. The least dressed of the assembled gods, Pharoah’s bare-chested Apollo wears sunglasses to denote the god’s association with the sun. Sudeikis’s Zeus jokes that Apollo must remember to wear sunblock; bewildered Pharoah lifts his glasses, the skin around his eyes made up to appear white. Sudeikis’s joke depends upon the popular opinion that a Greek god like Apollo must have been White. Significantly, the sketch highlights the race of Apollo’s actor while ignoring that of Eros’ actor. Here we find the first glimmer of the concept of selective race salience that will reappear through the remainder of this article. Although audiences of the global North consider Greco-Roman deities to be part of their cultural heritage, they often attach unequal importance to their depictions, with more scrutiny given to portrayals of prototypical deities like Zeus, Poseidon, or Apollo (and less to minor deities, like Eros—or, as we shall see, goddesses). Newer productions may push the envelope, with Maori New Zealander actor Cliff Curtis cast as Poseidon in Netflix’s upcoming KAOS, but no major film or television production other than Troy: Fall of a City cast Olympus’s chief god Zeus as non-White (with Russell Crowe playing Zeus in Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder, 2022).

Despite the emergence of certain modernizing trends in depictions of Greco-Roman deities and heroes in audiovisual media, cultural constraints like selective race salience seem to bar Black actors from being cast in these roles. More relevantly to the point at hand, however, many franchises accretively incorporate and remix elements from several genres and world mythical traditions, a practice known as a “fantasy kitchen-sink” approach (Paprocki 451). It is this accretion of elements from wider popular cultural influences that allows for certain color-conscious castings for culturally salient Greek deities: Cliff Curtis’s casting as Poseidon makes sense to audiences also familiar with Dwayne Johnson’s Maui, a Polynesian demigod of the wind and sea from Disney’s Moana (2016), and with Jason Momoa’s role as Aquaman, half-human king of Atlantis in the eponymous 2018 film. Arguably, within remixed, multi-source storyworlds, no preexistent cultural norm should dictate what is the “correct” portrayal of the ancient Greek masculine—and feminine—divine. Nevertheless, the inertia of cultural expectations still weighs on such depictions, with Black men and women bearing the load of stereotyped intersectional associations that may discourage such castings.

A GOD, A GODDESS, A MAN OF COLOR, A WOMAN OF COLOR: CASTING AND INTERSECTIONALITY IN TROY: FALL OF A CITY

With all above in mind, let us turn to the 2017 miniseries Troy: Fall of a City. A coproduction between the BBC and Netflix, the ten-part series was released to almost immediate consternation and allegations of blackwashing. The controversy centered around two characters and the actors who played them: Achilles, played by Black British actor David Gyasi, and Zeus, portrayed by British-Nigerian actor Hakeem Kae-Kazim. Both are established actors, and both have previously played historical and fantasy roles to little fanfare. Gyasi featured in the nineteenth-century BBC drama The Whale (2013) and recently portrayed Captain Hook in the 2020 film Come Away. In turn, Kae-Kazim has played Iago in Othello (2007), pirate lord Captain Jocard in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007), and pirate Mr. Scott in STARZ’s series Black Sails (2014–2017). Further, in Troy: Fall of a City, Gyasi and Kae-Kazim are not the only Black actors: among the cast, we find Shamilla Miller (Athena), Thando Hopa (Artemis), Lemogang Tsipa (Patroclus), and Peter Butler (Nestor), all Black South Africans, while Black British actor Alfred Enoch (best known as Dean Thomas in the Harry Potter franchise) plays Aeneas. Although this article’s focus is on female-coded representation, the strong reactions against racialized male-coded representations of the divine in Troy: Fall of a City stand in stark contrast to the silence over the Black female actresses in the series and throw into relief some of the very issues at play.

The surging wave of online backlash against casting of Gyasi and Kae-Kazim in Troy: Fall of a City encouraged Rebecca Futo Kennedy to contribute a chapter to Bloomsbury’s edited volume on the series (Screening Love and War in Troy: Fall of a City, 2022). Kennedy’s chapter (entitled “Racist Reactions to Black Achilles”) scrutinizes negative online reactions to Zeus and Achilles’ casting in Troy: Fall of a City, categorizing them into four types: (a) concern over “historical accuracy” of casting Black men to play ancient Greek gods and heroes; (b) Greek and Balkan nationalist backlash over appropriating/“blackwashing” Greek history; (c) White supremacism anxieties, with Greekness perceived as the core heritage of European culture; and (d) anti-Blackness sentiments, rising in Europe due to post-2015 migration crises (83–92). All of the reactions enumerated above, Kennedy argues, stem from the fact that the nineteenth-century scholars of classics superimposed modern social categories (such as race) upon the Greco-Roman antiquity. The Greeks and the Romans, cast as founders of the “Western Civilization” (itself a highly contested construct, Appiah 101), became commonly equated with modern “Whites,” by definition excluding other ancient Mediterranean peoples as “Oriental”/non-White (Paprocki 456). In result, any attempt to uncouple Whiteness and Greco-Roman culture in audiovisual media provokes outbursts of dismay and cultural policing.

“Any attempt to uncouple Whiteness and Greco-Roman culture in audiovisual media provokes outbursts of dismay and cultural policing.

The backlash against casting of Gyasi and Kae-Kazim as Achilles and Zeus in Troy: Fall of a City expressed the commonly held yet erroneous perception that the ancient Greeks and Romans were racially White. In fact, modern ideas about race categories date back no further than the seventeenth century, rooted in pseudo-scientific justifications for the trade in enslaved Africans (Painter 42–44). Regardless of the semantic history of racism, it should be noted and remembered that race itself has no basis in biology, and instead is defined by arbitrary groupings based on visual difference; Karen Fields and Barbara Fields coined the term “racecraft” to describe the processes behind the maintenance of the concepts of both race and racism (16–17). Although modern concepts of race bear very little relevance to imaginary societies of the Greek mythical storyworld, they certainly influence modern receptions of the said storyworld. A band of preeminent classical scholars have reacted to the Troy: Fall of a City casting controversy by writing a series of blog posts on the insignificance of Achilles’ race in the source material (“Scholars Respond to Racist Backlash against Black Achilles”). However, since the backlash against the Black casting in Troy: Fall of a City concerns a modern work of reception and mirrors modern anxieties about race in the global North, untangling these concepts demands a sustained focus on the receiving society, medium, and work of culture (and not solely on the ancient text or its context).

Significantly, popular global North depictions of the male Olympians in film and television reveal a reliance upon a palimpsest of previous receptions. For example, Lisa Maurice charts the development of the White image of Zeus and the ancient Greek masculine divine, noting the alignment of popular images of the fatherly, bearded Zeus in flowing white robes with that of the Judeo-Christian God (Maurice, Screening 41–42). Paradoxically, visual images of God do not themselves follow this trend in modern popular media; note, for example, Morgan Freeman’s casting as God in the 2003 film Bruce Almighty, an example of the “Black Angel” trope (Cyrino 126). Today, certain screen receptions move away from Zeus’ patriarchal type, as in the 2011 Immortals, where he is portrayed by Luke Evans as youthful and beardless, and notably, mortal (Tomasso 154). In turn, very recent works (including Marvel Cinematic Universe’s 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder and Disney’s Moon Knight) complicate the ontological category of a “god”: notably, they either distance their divine-named characters from “genuine gods” of Greco-Roman antiquity (about which more anon), depict them as extraterrestrials, or emphasize their mortality or moral culpability (Schedeen; Radulovic; Gordon). Nonetheless, even these divergent portrayals constantly recycle and draw inspiration from culturally significant epic films of the twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, regardless of whether they are historical or mythological. Beyond these ancient world films (a category operative only to classicists), depictions of Greco-Roman deities owe much to the modern epic blockbuster franchises in Marvel and DC’s cinematic universes, with comic-book superheroes demonstrably influenced by motifs drawn from the Greco-Roman myth and history (Gordon).

URSULA GOES BLACK: THE LITTLE MERMAID AND ONCE UPON A TIME

Female-coded deities also rely on palimpsestic representation, but to a very different effect. The following section explores problematic Black depictions of Greek-coded marine goddesses, analyzing Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989 film, dir. John Musker and Ron Clements), and ABC’s Once Upon a Time (2011–2018 TV series, showrunners Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz) to trace shifting depictions of Ursula, a daughter of Poseidon. Since Once Upon A Time draws much of its inspiration from works of Disney (and is owned by The Walt Disney Company), we read The Little Mermaid and Once Upon A Time as existing in the same (if heterogeneous) storyworld, with different instantations of Ursula’s character accretively fronting her Blackness, often with unexpected results. A conniving sea witch, The Little Mermaid’s Ursula uses mermaid Ariel to steal the underwater kingdom of Atlantica from Ariel’s father, King Triton. The film codes Ursula as a villain by highlighting her nonnormative traits according to the once-pervasive practice of Disney villain scripting (West). A half larger-bodied woman and half squid, the purplish Ursula stands out among the flesh-colored merpeople, with her flamboyant mannerisms evoking distinctly queer undertones. Significantly, Ursula’s unique skin tone may code her as non-White, a suggestion made manifest in her other appearances in Disney media. Kyndall Cunningham underscores that “[s]ince 1989, Disney has reimagined the role of Ursula with Black performers like Merrin Dungey in ABC’s Once Upon A Time …, Whoopi Goldberg in the Disney Channel Original Movie Descendants 2 and Queen Latifah … for the 2011 Disney Dreams Portrait series” and The Little Mermaid Live! in 2019.

Once Upon a Time (ABC) Season 4, 2014–2015. Episode: Darkness on the Edge of Town. Airdate: March 1, 2015. Shown: Merrin Dungey.

Photo courtesy of ABC/Photofest.

Following on, ABC’s Once Upon A Time borrows heavily from Disney’s fairy-tale storyworld and inherits some of its racial ambiguities, featuring two versions of Ursula: a golden-skinned patois-speaking CGI sea-goddess (voiced by Black actress Yvette Nicole Brown) and a Black octopoid sea-witch (Merrin Dungey). Once Upon A Time’s approach to its source material follows the fantasy kitchen-sink paradigm, with its mythologically inspired characters excerpted from Disney franchises (e.g., Hercules and Hades) or other popular instantations (such as Medusa). Despite the accretion of various world traditions, Once Upon A Time largely upholds the Whiteness of the mythical Greek storyworld—save for Ursula, doubled as the sea-goddess and sea-witch, illustrating a tendency to distance actual divinities from their namesakes. The sea-goddess Ursula’s first appearance (“Ariel”) manifests her in a mirror to castigate her impersonator, the Evil Queen. Depictions of both the goddess and her impersonator vividly evoke Ursula’s depiction in The Little Mermaid but exclude her larger body size, toning down the animated character’s queer-coding. Once Upon A Time’s golden-skinned goddess, Ursula, a CGI mirror image, resists racialization, not unlike the rainbow-hued divinities of Disney’s Hercules. The CGI rendering of the sea-goddess draws attention to the layers of receptive accretion in images of magic and the divine, inviting comparisons with the stop-motion creations of Ray Harryhausen (cf. Curley 215); indeed, Once Upon A Time’s CGI Medusa seems clearly inspired by Harryhausen’s version in the 1981 Clash of the Titans.

“Once Upon A Time’s golden-skinned goddess, Ursula, a CGI mirror image, resists racialization, not unlike the rainbow-hued divinities of Disney’s Hercules.

When the sea-witch Ursula finally makes an appearance in the season-four episode “Heroes and Villains,” her image deviates from that of The Little Mermaid: possessing both tentacles and legs, she wears a green bejeweled costume that evokes her connection to the sea rather than purplish hues of Ursula’s previous incarnations. This second Ursula, named after the goddess, is the daughter of merman King Poseidon (Ernie Hudson). As with Ursula, it remains uncertain whether this Poseidon is the Poseidon of Greek myth, his image alluding to that of Triton in The Little Mermaid. Unlike her fellow White villainesses, affluent Maleficent (Kristen Bauer van Straten) and Cruella De Vil (Victoria Smurfit), Ursula, when thrust into the “land without magic,” ekes out a living with menial jobs and stays in a cluttered apartment (“Darkness on the Edge of Town”), reflecting the screenwriters’ reliance on racialized semiotic coding (cf. Davies and Smith 52). The goddess Ursula cannot be Black, but the sea-witch can, and if the sea-witch is Black, she must also conform to the audience’ expectations of what Blackness means. In the fantastical side of the storyworld, where Ursula wields magic and her “race” is of no consequence, the powerful villainess stands shoulder-to-shoulder with her peers; in the “real” world, Ursula is divided from other villainesses by racecraft and falls into the concomitant expectations.

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010). Directed by Chris Columbus. Shown: Rosario Dawson.

Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation/Photofest.

OUR LADY UNDERGROUND: BLACK PERSEPHONE IN THE MAGICIANS

In direct contrast to Once Upon A Time, the fantastic storyworld of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (comprising the 2009 novel and Syfy’s 2015–2020 television series, showrunners Sera Gamble and John McNamara) accretively incorporates a plethora of world religious traditions, with Persephone and Hades consciously cast as Black. A mix of urban fantasy and high fantasy, Grossman’s postmodern trilogy traces misadventures of a band of friends studying at a Wizarding grad school called Brakebills University who travel between Earth and the Narnia-like world of Fillory. The franchise’s milieu depicts magical praxis as an imperfect approximation of divine power: a coven of magicians “study gods the way an entomologist studies insects,” hoping “to learn their techniques” (The Magician King, 424–25). In novels, the coven attempts to summon an enigmatic Provencal goddess, Our Lady Underground, whom the television series syncretically links with goddesses from other religious traditions. Eventually, the series identifies Our Lady Underground as Greek Persephone (Garcelle Beauvais), a Black woman clad in white and bathed in light (playing with, yet transcending, the “magical Negro” trope). Although the magicians desperately beseech Persephone for help, she declines to intervene until they almost kill her son, a murderous rapist god known as Reynard the Fox (Mackenzie Astin; “Ramifications”). In gratitude for sparing Reynard’s life, Persephone grants one of the characters godhood that she extracted from Reynard in punishment for his crimes. The Magicians’ Persephone, in accord with the Greek mythos, reigns the Underworld with Hades (Michael Luwoye) and guards the shades of the deceased. Although she is eventually killed by a powerful monster (“The Secret Sea”), The Magicians’ Persephone remains arguably the most striking and influential divine character in the franchise, with her conscious casting reflecting the general diversity of the series. Significantly, the series makes no attempt to distance Black Persephone from her Greek roots, confirming her status as a Greek deity.

NEW CASTINGS, NEW DIRECTIONS: PERCY JACKSON AND WHAT LIES AHEAD

The final franchise analyzed in this article, Percy Jackson, went in advance of The Magicians by casting a Black Persephone (Rosario Dawson) in 2010’s Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (dir. Chris Columbus). The 20th Century Fox film, based on Rick Riordan’s expansive book series, tells the story of the eponymous hero who discovers he is a demigod son of Poseidon. The film has Zeus accuse Percy’s father of stealing his master bolt: Percy is tasked to retrieve it before a divine war erupts. Although the film cast the majority of characters as White (with Sean Bean as Zeus), the cast included Black actors: Grover (Brandon T. Jackson, a satyr), Hephaestus (Conrad Coates), and, most relevantly, Persephone (Rosario Dawson). Persephone plays a somewhat prominent role in that she helps the heroes against Hades, the real thief of the master bolt. Exceedingly unhappy in her marriage to Hades, Persephone turns against him, recovers the bolt and smites him, giving Percy and his friends a chance to leave and take the bolt. Our point to take is that the race of the goddess appears insignificant in the film: although there are few non-White characters, they are never stereotyped and the Black goddess plays a pivotal role in the narrative. The upcoming TV series, currently in production for Disney+, attaches considerable weight to the diversity of its casting. Rick Riordan personally defended the casting of Leah Jeffries as Annabeth Chase (Athena’s demigod daughter) in a blog post that cited Disney’s company policy on nondiscrimination (Riordan), even if his merit-based argument touches on rather naive colorblind assertions.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: “COLOR-BLINDNESS,” COLORISM, AND COUNTERINTUITIVE CASTING

Having examined a selection of Black representations of Greco-Roman goddesses in film and on television, we demonstrated that intersectional forces of commodification, colorism, and color-conscious casting have allowed audiences to react neutrally or favorably toward female divine representations, in direct contrast to more contested portrayals of male Black deities. Chronologically, the trendsetting Disney’s Hercules (1997) and its Muses opened avenues for increased presence of Black actresses in cinema and television, with subsequent portrayals of Black goddesses in Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (2010), The Magicians (2015–2020), and Troy: Fall of a City (2018). Every cultural palimpsest, however progressive, traffics in reactionary elements. Kennedy’s summary of anti-Black backlash against Troy: Fall of a City indicates that, even in fantasy kitchen-sink franchises that indiscriminately draw from world traditions and cultures, global North audiences may unconsciously police racial and ethnic boundaries, with creative companies pandering to their expectations. Although The Little Mermaid’s subsequent transformative adaptations frequently cast Ursula with Black performers (Ursula’s Blackness embraced by the fan community), the upcoming live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid casts Ariel as Black (Halle Bailey) and Ursula as White (Melissa McCarthy) amidst fan outrage at whitewashing Ursula (Cunningham). However, the increasing number of Black performers cast in similar roles can be expected to gradually sway the audiences’ expectations, perhaps up to the point where nothing should disqualify Blackness from roles of Greek deities.

“Every cultural palimpsest, however progressive, traffics in reactionary elements.

Our explorations of race in castings of Greco-Roman deities in modern audiovisual media benefit from examining theoretical and social considerations behind every casting choice. In theater, television, and film, casting against audience expectations of race based purely on acting merit is known as “nontraditional” or “colorblind” casting. Such casting can also be deliberate (“color-conscious”). Harvey Young notes that color-conscious casting “encourages audiences to see race and to think critically about its meaning and value in performance,” whereas colorblind casting is not intended to change the production’s meaning (60). Some scholars have challenged the idea that audiences can be “colorblind” and criticized the alternative term of “nontraditional” casting for its semantic vagueness (Cima 2014). More generally, the idea of “color blindness” as a social practice—whereby society should be encouraged to ignore race altogether—reinforces the normativity of Whiteness and the attendant social inequalities between ethnic groups (Headley 95–96). Whatever casting decisions are made and however they are reached, the sociopolitical milieu of the audiences will undoubtedly shape how the viewers receive characters’ visual identity and categorize them according to the local paradigms of racecraft. William Sun argues that, in theater, while new plays are difficult to cast color-consciously due to audiences’ preconceptions, familiarity with the characters of existing well-known works means that actors’ ethnicities are not important (91). In terms of “classical” Greco-Roman narrative, Sun’s claim is untrue; the audiences perceive these works—partly due to perceptions of them as the bedrock of Western culture—as White stories and accordingly have clear expectations of how the characters in these plays should look.

“Whatever casting decisions are made and however they are reached, the sociopolitical milieu of the audiences will undoubtedly shape how the viewers receive characters’ visual identity and categorize them according to the local paradigms of racecraft.

These arguments are replicated—to a point—when Black women are cast in roles as Greco-Roman deities, as they are equally overlooked in casting decisions. Here, the distinction between the casting of Black men and Black women becomes apparent. Popular ideologies of Black masculinity align Black men with excess and moral degradation (hooks, Black Looks 89). On screen, less negative portrayals often fall into cliched tropes such as the “magical Negro” (Glenn and Cunningham 138), leaving Black actors to choose between roles of “either a shaman or a scoundrel” (Williams 168). As such, Black men seem not to fit the constructed Western ideal of balance and “perfection” attached to Greekness and the divine. Furthermore, Black masculinity is often subordinated to White masculinity in global North visual popular culture (hooks, Reel to Real 105–06); the subordination translates to aforementioned race-salience paradigms, regulating who is allowed to depict whom across the Greco-Roman pantheon on the television and in cinema. For Black men, the perceptions of them as racially and socially subordinate to White men results in their almost total barring from depicting Greco-Roman deities.

For Black women and other women of color, colorism, a form of discrimination based on skin tone, becomes a more pressing concern, with racially ambiguous actresses more readily accepted in predominantly White cinematic spaces than dark-skinned ones. As White women can stand as metaphors for embodied racial purity as per ideals of White beauty (Deliovsky 56–57), pale(r) skin becomes a beauty ideal applied to non-White women. Very few dark-skinned actresses shoot to fame in Hollywood, and when they are actually cast in franchises and films, it often becomes a salient political choice in terms of upholding or negating ethnic stereotypes. On the sliding scale of acceptance, ethnically ambiguous Brown is better than Black, and White is better than Brown, with Mediterranean olive skin tones still loosely categorized as White (Kennedy 93). Another factor that can compound or counterbalance the effect of colorism is commodification of cinema. Actors are commodified to sell the visual product more effectively to audiences and sex appeal reigns supreme. Even where Black or dark-skinned women are cast in leading roles, this is rarely radical and usually down to individual casting decisions by those with the most power (hooks, Reel to Real 91–92). Femininity and sexual attractiveness can overcome race: occupying an intermediate position in the hierarchy, Black women and Black goddesses possess a degree of mobility and can rise to new heights.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors express their heartfelt appreciation to each other, coeditors of this issue (Prof. Monica Silveira Cyrino, Dr. Sylvie Magerstaedt), reviewers, Prof. Fiona McHardy, Prof. Susan Deacy, Dr. Ian Kinane, and Aaron Scott. The authors report there are no competing interests to declare. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under Grant number 2480119.

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Notes on contributors

Aimee Hinds Scott

Aimee Hinds Scott is a PhD student at the University of Roehampton in London, UK. Her research centers on intersectional approaches to representations of marginalized genders in receptions of Greek mythology in popular culture, with an emphasis on pushing at the boundaries of feminist theory. Her research combines classical reception with popular-culture studies, and questions the “high/low” culture divide in reception and its effects on the cultural ideologies in receptive media.

Maciej Paprocki

Maciej Paprocki is an academic specialist at the University of Wrocław, Poland, and studies ancient Greek gods as depicted in epic poetry and modern media: their powers, limitations, fears, and wants. He has worked as an historical consultant, helping to develop Apotheon (2015), a video game set in the mythological storyworld of ancient Greece. His current work includes projects on divine families in epic Greek poetry and a coedited volume on Achilles’ mother, Thetis (De Gruyter).