Space oddity – Reading Nirmal Puwar’s Space Invaders: race, gender and bodies out of place in decolonial times

Abstract

UK museums are embracing decolonisation as a discourse and an institutional cultural policy. There has been a shift in the sector whereby discussions of colonial violence and white supremacy have become more common. Do we feel optimism at this turn or should we also be wary? Just as the museum has historically helped determine the canon of knowledge, it can also determine the ways in which we unpack and critique that canon. It can seek to manage its troubling ‘others’ in ways which may both give voice to them, but also contain and limit those voices. It can be the means through which it manages a fear of its own engulfment and loss of power and authority. How will institutions deal with the fact that we are not coming for ‘inclusion’ but for power? Viewed through the prism of my own work with museums and informed by Space Invaders and Puwar’s observation that black women are ‘offered the floor to speak of marginality’ (p. 73), this piece will give a personal analysis of my shifting spatial and somatic discomfort as structural and political.