Published 20 April 200920 April 2009 · Main Posts Let’s break it down, your fine black Majesty… Maxine Beneba Clarke Walt Disney’s first cartoon black princess is ready to jitterbug her way across the ballroom in The Princess and the Frog, set in jazz-era New Orleans. The movie won’t be released until Christmas, but what we do know is that Princess Tiana’s mother will be voiced by Oprah Winfrey and the movie will feature a Spanish prince and a toothless old firefly with a suspect Southern accent which echoes that of the ‘lazy’ Jamaican lobster from The Little Mermaid. James C. Collier at Acting White covers the ‘black princess, tanned prince’ dilemma well (Is it that Disney thinks white girls can’t identify with Princess Tiana if the prince is black, or are they just anti black-on-black love? If the prince were say, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, white Southern wackos would surely campaign against the movie as a ‘multiculturalist’ conspiracy to breed the world brown…etc etc). In any case, it will be interesting to watch the fireworks as the release date gets closer. And of course, the Disney reps will be close at hand flashing their gold-capped teeth and giving the old ‘Why not see the movie and make up your own mind’ line. Maxine Beneba Clarke Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian author and slam poet of Afro- Caribbean descent. Her short fiction collection Foreign Soil won the 2015 ABIA Award for Best Literary Fiction and the 2015 Indie Award for Best Debut Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Her memoir, The Hate Race, her poetry collection Carrying the World, and her first children’s book, The Patchwork Bike, will be published by Hachette in late 2016. More by Maxine Beneba Clarke Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays First published in Overland Issue 228 25 May 202326 May 2023 · Main Posts The ‘Chinese question’ and colonial capitalism in New Gold Mountain Christy Tan SBS’s New Gold Mountain sets out to recover the history of the Gold Rush from the marginalised perspective of Chinese settlers but instead reinforces the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty. Although celebrated for its multilingual script and diverse representation, the mini-TV series ignores how the settlement of Chinese migrants and their recruitment into colonial capitalism consolidates the ongoing displacement of First Nations peoples. First published in Overland Issue 228 15 February 202322 February 2023 · Main Posts Self-translation and bilingual writing as a transnational writer in the age of machine translation Ouyang Yu To cut a long story short, it all boils down to the need to go as far away from oneself as possible before one realizes another need to come back to reclaim what has been lost in the process while tying the knot of the opposite ends and merging them into a new transformation.
