'This issue of Cordite Poetry Review in particular focuses on the racist act of Brownface, especially in Australia. Brownface stems from the dehumanisation of Black people in the form of Blackface. Award-winning Afro-Caribbean-Australian author Maxine Beneba Clarke writes that Blackface was created when ‘White performers liberally applied black greasepaint or shoe polish and used distorted dialogue, exaggerated accents and grotesque movements to caricature people of African descent’ in the name of ‘art’.' (Winnie Siulolovao, from Editorial introduction)
'For reasons sufficient to the writer, as ‘Papa’ would say, certain places, people and words have been left out of these notes. Some are secret and some are known by everyone. There is, for instance, no mention of the row of shophouses in Bugis Junction, with their 19th Century carvings of flowers and patterned panels and broken wooden shutters, among them his childhood home, that he tore down when he grew up, nor of the jade green and lotus pink Peranakan tiles of a girls’ school, nor of dilly dallying, nor of Mt Sinai and Tan Kim Cheng and Goodwood and Randy Wick, nor of the sour smell of her breath when she kissed me and drank coffee from a condensed milk can and rolled white Gardenia bread into little balls between her fingers and sat and ate with one elbow resting on a raised knee. These notes are the straying and breaking of the root of an utterance, the strange fruit of constraint.' (Introduction)
'Academia has inherited a long history of non-Indigenous people speaking for Indigenous people and defining Indigeneity and Indigenous cultural heritage – each recurring act erasing Indigenous voices and agencies to speak. Within the discipline of Indigenous Studies, scholars are carving out new transformative pedagogical spaces to create Indigenous-determined stories and storylines. We advocate that, now more than ever, next-generation Indigenous storytelling is needed to nurture intergenerational story cycles which imagine and enliven Indigenous-determined futures.' (Introduction)
