Actress Zendaya has been on the receiving end of some, ahem, piercing criticism after wearing ancient Iranian earrings to a London event promoting the new Christopher Nolan epic The Odyssey, in which she plays the Greek goddess Athena. The film hits US and UK theaters July 17 and has already been the subject of intense debate.
Zendaya got the earrings, believed to date from the first millennium BCE, from London dealer Charlie Barron, and then had them remounted with diamonds and 18-karat yellow gold, reports the London-based New Arab, which earlier reported on the criticisms. Barron’s website touts a collection that “spans centuries, from antique and estate pieces to contemporary works by leading designers.” The jeweler did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“I find Western celebrities … to be largely deaf to questions of ethics and history when it comes to the Global South,” Zirrar Ali, a London-based writer and expert on Islamic history, art, and architecture, told the New Arab. Wearing such items, he adds, “can in fact constitute a display of power and domination: one culture asserting ownership over the heritage of another.” Co-author of Ghazi and the Garden: Poetry of Muhammad Iqbal, Ali describes his work as seeking to “revive and illuminate a vision of Islamic cultural and spiritual renewal.”
Ali branded Zendaya’s move as “distasteful” and “in line with Orientalist practices.”
The Odyssey promo took place on July 5, the day before Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attacked three commercial vessels in the Persian Gulf, further threatening the fragile cease-fire between the US and Iran after the parties signed a Memorandum of Understanding on June 12. The terms of the memorandum have been hazily defined, and the agreement has quickly frayed. US President Donald Trump ordered the reinstatement of a naval blockade on July 13 after notifying Congress that fighting, which never really ended, had resumed. The war began with Israeli strikes on Iran in February and has resulted in damage to numerous heritage sites in addition to the deaths of thousands of Iranians.
While the Zendaya earrings are not known to be of problematic provenance, they do appear in the context of not only war but also of a long history of improper removal of antiquities from the Middle East. Just this month, for example, New York investigators returned dozens of looted antiquities to countries including Indonesia, Italy, and Iran’s neighbor Iraq, which received antiquities collectively valued at nearly $300,000.
The film itself has come in for plenty of criticism over its historical accuracy. Political conservatives are up in arms after Nolan cast transgender actor Elliot Page to play a male character and Lupita Nyong’o to play Helen of Troy, since the latter is Black and Homer describes the mythical figure as “white-armed.” The conservatives don’t seem to have a problem with Matt Damon, not exactly a Greek ethnic type, playing the lead as Odysseus, but Greek-British journalist Chris Cotonou does, writing in the Guardian that Greeks have been “left out by Hollywood, again and with no explanation, from our foundational mythologies and epics.” (He puts forth Greek-American actor Billy Zane, who is four Academy Award nominations behind Damon, with zero, as an alternative.) “Not a single Greek,” he observes of the cast.
