Multiculturalism versus the myth of the West

On the basis that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, Christopher Nolan’s movie, The Odyssey, is having a second helping of great notoriety this week. It comes courtesy of an admission from actress Lupita Nyong’o, who conceded that until she was cast to play Helen of Troy, she had never heard of Homer’s great tale of gods and men.

In an interview for a fawning profile in Elle magazine, Nyong’o said, “I really had no idea what The Odyssey was. I was like, ‘Oh snap, I don’t know the first thing about this.’” Although she had performed a few monologues from Greek mythology when she was at Yale drama school, Nyong’o was “unfamiliar with the source material.”

To which the obvious response is, how could someone get into an MA program at Yale while entirely ignorant of the 2,800-year-old epic, a foundational text and one of the cardinal works of classical