Title: Bla(c)kness in Australia
Year: 2018
Issue: 126
Cover image: Michael Cook, Undiscovered #5, 2010. Inkjet print. Courtesy the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY + dianne tanzer gallery
Since the early 1990’s, “the term Blak has been used by Aboriginal people to claim their own unique histories and identities independent of limiting phenotypical and romanticized conceptions of Blackness.” In the gathering of voices in T126, Guest Editors Sujatha Fernandes and Jared Thomas “show the expansiveness of what it means to be Bla(c)k” and also “highlight the complexity of projects of Black solidarity in settler colonial Australia. Kaiya Aboagaye shows how, in the anti-black, settler colonial imagination, Afro-Indigenous encounters are misconstrued to reinforce hierarchies between these two groups, and Alison Whittaker’s poem “Ships in the Night” grapples with the disturbing history of the Afro-Indigenous encounter. T126 “offers ways of navigating” this awkward, sometimes uneasy, decidedly “tricky terrain in the ongoing pursuit of local and international Bla(c)k solidarities that confront a global rise of white supremacy.” In an all too familiar global story, Omid Tofighian reveals Australia’s racialized system of border patrol in the context of the country’s colonial past in “Black Bodies for Political Profit: Sudanese and Somali Standpoints on Australia’s Racialized Border Regime.” Then asylum-seeker Mohamed Adam tells his own story within this system: he fled his home in war-torn Sudan for Australia, hoping for a better life. Instead, Australia has warehoused him in an offshore prison, along with hundreds of other refugees.