Convivial Cleopatra

—José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

What happens when we theorize Cleopatra’s racialized and sexualized queenship through the twinned frameworks of indigenous and queer conviviality? This question has gripped me as I composed the Oxford World Series’ Critical Introduction to Antony and Cleopatra. The more I think through the play, the more I am convinced of its investment in both indigenous conviviality and queer temporality. By the former, I mean an amorphous North African grouping of Amazigh Ottomans, Arabs, Black Africans, and Greeks; Bedawis, Noubians and Sa‘īdīs; and Muslims, Copts, and diasporic Jews.¹ Queer temporality, moreover, enacts a way of living inimical to the linear, heteronormative time of family formations and the technologies of capital. In the play, scenes arguably set in the vicinity of the busy seaport town of Alexandria and the fluvial waterways of Tarsus gesture toward affirmative social networks of belonging generated by the geopolitical heterogeneity of Mediterranean cities. These motley spatial imaginings, mostly illegible to white, European audiences, reach beyond the hierarchical, moralistic, and masculinist infrastructure within which the colonizing Roman state operates. In this way, queer and indigenous conviviality models a fluid prism of being and belonging that operates within circuits of movement and hospitality; displacement and transience; chance encounters and togetherness.

Before getting ahead of myself, a word on the concept of conviviality or convivencia is in order. Black cultural theorists, particularly those studying pluralistic communities and diasporic points of contact, have engaged in “the convivial turn,” which stands for quotidian encounters of people existing in globalized, urban, and multi-ethnic societies.² Despite many stark differences across race, gender, sexuality, and class, the physical proximity of these disparate groups prompts a charged interdependence—at times amiable, pragmatic, or even hostile—in day-to-day interpersonal relationships. Key to these interactions is their unromanticized everydayness, where their chaotic, concentrated welding of differences plays out, and the signature primacy of white reproductive sameness takes a backseat. In this porous model of sociality, stories circulate, desires collide, and beliefs collapse and coalesce elusively, haphazardly, freely.³

In the United States, I have experienced the most vivid examples of conviviality on my visits to the Folger Shakespeare Library in D.C. When I walked the city or rode the bus, I felt an unmediated intimacy with the multitudes of minoritized people that a metropole brings together. Taking the metro, my tense muscles often relaxed from simply hearing an orchestra of spoken languages, including my native one, Arabic. Those were examples of visceral responses I rarely encountered in the sprawling Midwest where I had settled in the late aughts. In the Folger collections, this sentiment erupted once more when I consulted the unique manuscript of Account of Alessandro Magno’s journeys to Cyprus, Egypt, Spain, England, Flanders, Germany and Brescia 1557-1565, containing illustrations of the places the Venetian merchant visits during his Levantine travels. Notably, the travelogue includes sketches of the interiors of an Islamic Cairene house, where the Qa‘a (main hall) is represented as the vestibule connecting the public sphere to the privacy of a city dwelling (see Figure 1). I wish to imagine these liminal spaces as contrapuntal to the clichéd spectacularization of Cleopatra’s decadent court in western adaptations of the play. What possibilities unfold by examining Cleopatra’s court through the spatial conviviality of a Mediterranean Qa’a rather than an Orientalized pleasure dome of a despot as represented in Figures 2 and 3?

In a similar vein, a polyvocality of affects and multiple possibilities of embodiment underwrites queer temporalities and kinship formations. Queer conceptualizations of time insist on disorienting its linear construction by the conventions of heteronormativity and capital. Specifically, I am thinking of the generative and mobile interplay between a queer utopianism lurking in the future, beautifully theorized by José Muñoz and others; the ambivalent affective mode of “living with difference,” following Stuart Hall’s phraseology; and the deeply-rooted reciprocal practices of indigenous collectivities. In premodern studies, queer readings of literary and other cultural outputs have underlined the robust presence of other modes of sociality.⁴ Framed in the holistic terms of improvisational assemblages, indigenous sociality, and queer worldmaking, Antony and Cleopatra, I argue, presents the diverse social constructions and value systems of the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian South Mediterranean beyond the edicts of external European forces. Building on Ambereen Dadabhoy’s field-shifting monograph, Shakespeare Through Islamic Worlds, which convincingly argues that Islam and its cultures informed the plots, themes, and intellectual investments of Shakespeare’s plays, I localize the play within its complex Mediterranean racial geography and belief systems. I am also inspired by Abdulhamit Arvas’ provocation to read Antony and Cleopatra as an Ottoman Mediterranean play in his forthcoming book, Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity. By conjoining these frameworks together, my provocation moves our understanding of the play outside the paradigm of Roman austerity and Egyptian excess, European injury and indigenous resistance.

Instead, my reading is an invitation to catch fleeting glimpses of alternative worldbuilding in which Cleopatra’s Egyptian court functions; and to think deeply about the systems of power sharing in this fictionalized historical context. A broader set of questions open once Cleopatra, her politics, and her entourage are considered through the prism of other possible worlds: What are the beliefs and value systems energizing Cleopatra’s court? How do these forces condition, alchemize, and congeal everyday indigenous worldmaking? In what ways does the associative barrage of self-killing at the end of the play inhere the intrinsic relationship between worldmaking and world-shattering, beginnings and endings? What could Cleopatra’s radical yet deliberate turn towards the abyss of nothingness generate?

Cleopatra’s approaching death activates the spectral possibilities of diasporic conviviality and queer temporality. Following Rome’s conquest of Egypt, Cleopatra, Charmian, and Iras devise a plan to foil Caesar’s plan to parade the Egyptian queen and her entourage in his triumph. In a famous metatheatrical tableau, Cleopatra scrupulously prognosticates her imminent humiliation in Rome as it would be enacted by a professional boy actor, where “[…] Saucy lictors / Will catch at us [i.e. Cleopatra] like strumpets” (5.2.261-2); and “Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my [i.e. Cleopatra’s] greatness / I’th’ posture of a whore” (5.2.267-8). Against the embodied materiality of conquest, as her ritualized dispossession becomes a fully formed reality, “a queen his [i.e. Caesar’s] beggar” (5.2.18), Cleopatra summons the powers of queer Convivencia, transporting her community into the realm of non-normative temporality:

This scene is followed by another brief but meaningful moment of conviviality between Cleopatra and the wry fallah, or “rural farmer,” who smuggles the fatal asp in a basketful of figs. In the play’s final scene, these socially and racially disparate characters experience a mutual recognition of the “joy of the worm,” or “the literary dynamic of pleasure in self-destruction” (13), which propels Drew Daniel’s provocations in Joy of the Worm. Daniel brilliantly unpacks the multi-layered meaning of the ‘multi-layered meaning of the “slapstick campiness” (63)’ of humor pressurizing the seriousness of death. In less than 40 lines (5.2.284-333), the ecstatic force accompanying self-killing, or the joy of the worm, animates an affectively-charged example of conviviality between two characters stratified by race, class, and gender yet unified through “the pretty worm of Nilus there / that kills and pains not?” (5.2.297-8).

But this is as far as Cleopatra’s recourse to the networks of solidarity in queer conviviality goes. In this brief interlude, Cleopatra racializes the rural fellow by pointing out the discrepancy between his low class, on one hand, and noble conduct, on the other. In her magisterial study, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, Patricia Akhimie teaches us to notice Cleopatra’s telling surprise, “What poor an instrument / May do a noble deed!”—indeed, a deed which “brings [her] liberty” (5.2.289-290). The suggestion here is that the trade in liberty would be inaccessible to subordinate groups, underlined by the Guardsman’s earlier line: “he brings you figs” (5.2.231). The interplay between the finite materiality of figs, the unfreedoms of service, and the immeasurable expansiveness of liberty as self-killing is remarkable.⁵ What to make of Cleopatra’s raced and classed bid to hierarchy?

This hierarchizing move points to the limits of queer conviviality operating within the power mechanisms and constraints of coloniality. As the colonial hegemon du jour, Rome imposes its belief systems and practices unto a local and indigenous Mediterranean ecology, whose modes of sociality, governance, and cultural identities are fully formed.⁶ Rightly so, many read Octavius’s conquest of Egypt at the end of the play as the triumph of Roman masculine order and its colonial reach. On one level, it fulfills one of Rome’s most urgent objectives, as the Egyptologist Solange Ashby tells us in Calling Out Isis: The Enduring Nubian Presence at Philae, to control and extract Egypt’s grain output. On another level, Roman rule ensures the dismantling of queer conviviality and erasure of its indigenous and queer networks of kinship. It further implicates Cleopatra’s Egypt within a topography of patrician masculinist power.

And yet, Cleopatra’s final turn towards the planetary—the “Magnetic Fields” pace Muñoz—lingers on: “I am fire and air; my other elements / I give to baser life” (5.2.344-5); and the liberatory: “No planet is of mine” (5.2.294). It is striking how her death figures as both beginnings and endings, power and wonder, especially as it gestures towards the ouroboros of worldmaking and world-ending. Cleopatra’s tragic, apocalyptic orientation towards nothingness is indeed world-shattering. She is, quite factually, the last of the Ptolemaic pharaohs. There is room for a plausible alternative to the play’s heteronormative temporality, however—one which envisages Cleopatra’s aubade to cosmic regeneration as an expansiveness towards the chaotic good of queer utopianism and queer spectrality: “I have nothing /Of woman in me. / […]. Now the fleeting moon / No planet is of mine” (5.2.291-4). We can choose to read her final lines as tragic capitulation. I choose to read them otherwise—marvelously suspended between the fugitive intimations of utopian dreaming and the ontological possibilities that nothingness engenders.