Space Invaders

Though she was a life-long Liverpool FC fan, Doreen Massey felt like a “space invader” whenever she attended matches, as she’d often be one of the few women on football terraces. Inspired by Massey’s usage of the term, sociologist Nirmal Puwar developed it into a sociological concept to understand “what happens when women and racialized minorities take up ‘privileged’ positions which have not been ‘reserved’ for them”. What kind of bodies are the somatic norm? What are the conditions of inclusion? 

Spatial Delight host Agata Lisiak speaks with Nirmal Puwar about her book Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (2004), and about the postcolonial acts of space invading that Nirmal and her collaborators staged in Coventry’s iconic cathedral.

We’d love to hear your stories too. Are you a space invader? Please share your experiences with us here

Episode Credits
Host: Agata Lisiak
Guest: Nirmal Puwar
Also Featured: Doreen Massey
Writer and Producer: Agata Lisiak
Senior Editor: Susan Stone 
Sound Producer: Reece Cox
Production Assistant: Adèle Martin
Music: Studio R
Artwork: Bose Sarmiento
Special Thanks to: Nitin Sawhney, Kuldip Powar
In partnership with: The Sociological Review Foundation
Funded by: Volkswagen Foundation

Find more about Spatial Delight at The Sociological Review. 

Episode Resources

Doreen Massey’s work quoted or mentioned in this episode:

• Space, Place and Gender (Polity Press, 1994)
• When Theory Meets Politics, Antipode, 40.3 (2008)

Nirmal Puwar’s selected works:

• Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (Bloomsbury, 2004)
• The Noise of the Past
• Unraveling, a film directed by Kuldip Powar, music by Nitin Sawhney, produced by Nirmal Puwar and Sanjay Sharma, 2008
• Meetings: John Berger in the Library, an essay from A Jar of Wild Flowers, 2016 
• Walking Through Litter in Life Writing Projects
• Indomitable Mint in The Garden Zine 
• Compiling Maxwell Street by Tim Cresswell, Sociological Review Magazine, 2019 
• In Memoriam: Tree Felling at The Plaza and In Transition: Comrades for the City – films by Adele Mary Reed in collaboration with Nirmal Puwar and Paul Chokran
• Puwar, N. and Sharma, S. 2011. Introduction: War Cries, The Senses and Society, 6:3, 261-266.

Transcript

Nirmal Puwar reading Doreen Massey: 0:02

"And all of it -- all of these acres of Manchester -- was divided up into football pitches and rugby pitches ... the whole vast area would be covered with hundreds of little people, all running around after balls, as far as the eye could see. I remember all this very sharply. And I remember, too, it striking me very clearly -- even then, as a puzzled, slightly thoughtful little girl -- that all this huge stretch of the Mersey flood plane had been entirely given over to boys. I did not go to those playing fields -- they seemed barred, another world (though today, with more nerve and some consciousness of being a space invader, I do stand on football terraces -- and love it)."

Agata Lisiak: 0:58

Hello and welcome to Spatial Delight, a podcast about the politics of space inspired by the life and work of geographer Doreen Massey. I'm your host Agata Lisiak, Associate Professor of Migration Studies at Bard College Berlin. The title of today's episode is Space Invaders. Yes, like the popular video game. But that's not what our episode is about. It's about what happens when some bodies -- some people -- come to occupy spaces that they're not expected to enter. I couldn't think of a better person to discuss this with than Dr. Nirmal Puwar, a sociologist at Goldsmiths, University of

London, and the author of Space Invaders: 1:37

Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Nirmal interviewed a hundred British Members of Parliament and senior civil servants. She wanted to understand what happens when women and racialised minorities take up privileged positions, which have not been reserved for them. Space Invaders was published almost twenty years ago, but it continues to resonate in powerful ways because despite some progress, many people are still being excluded from important spaces. Nirmal's book has been hugely influential among researchers, activists and artists. It inspired important initiatives such as Museum Space Invaders, a network of intersectional feminists claiming equal space for all women and non-binary folks in UK museums, galleries and the heritage sector. I've been teaching Space Invaders for several years now. And I always look forward to the class discussions that the book generates. It motivates students to reflect on their positionalities in exclusive spaces including, of course, academia itself. And I keep getting inspired by the book myself. In fact, it's safe to say I have an academic crush on Nirmal Puwar. So I was very excited, and perhaps a tiny bit intimidated, when she agreed to speak to me for this podcast. I travelled to Nirmal's home in Coventry to talk about the concept of space invaders, and also to visit the city that she's written about in her more recent essays. Nirmal very kindly invited me to her living room where we chatted for hours over copious cups of chai. We actually spent most of our time talking about the books we love and authors we admire, including Doreen Massey, of course!'Space invader' is a key term in much of your work. It even lends your book its title. How did you first encounter it?

Nirmal Puwar: 3:37

Yeah, I came across the term when I was quite lost with my data analysis. So I had rooms full of transcripts of stories of having conducted 100 interviews with senior women and people of colour in the senior civil service and the British House of Commons. And I was trying to make sense of their position because they were in an institution that wasn't designed for them. But now they had arrived. And these narratives were full of conflictual stories and contradictions. So alongside listening to my transcripts, I was reading a lot of books, and doing that shuttling of back and forth between books and data. Now, one of the central books became Doreen Massey's book Space, Place and Gender. And in there, there's an essay where she uses the word 'space invaders'. And it refers to her experience -- a very vivid scene, actually, she provides for us, written in quite a poetic language, I would say -- and it's a scene from Manchester, when she's a young girl, Saturday morning, she's going into town on the bus, on the top deck with her mother. She looks across the playing fields and she sees lots of legs running around, and they're boys, boys on the playing field, playing football and rugby. But she didn't feel included in that, that wasn't her space. But now as an adult, she reflects on how she actually just does go to the football terraces, she does watch the matches. And even if she's a space invader, she's there. So she's arrived. She's a space invader. She belongs in one sense, but doesn't fully belong. She can't be barred, but she's there. And that, for me, made enormous sense for thinking about how people have taken up positions, which have historically and conceptually not been designed for them, but at the same time, they are insiders. And it's that space of tension, or that tenuous location that drew me to the term'space invader' and with it I inhabit a whole new framework by moving back and forth between the term and my data.

Agata Lisiak: 6:01

Another key term you use in your book is 'somatic norm'. What is it? And how does it connect to 'space invaders'?

Nirmal Puwar: 6:12

Yes, 'somatic norm' is a bodily term -- so our somatics -- and it helps us to understand issues that are normally labelled diversity or inclusion, with an emphasis on counting how many bodies are of so and so, I don't know, ethnicity or genders. And I wanted to go beyond that and to think about [how] diversity inclusion is not only about bringing more bodies in, different bodies in, but rather we need to look at what kind of bodies are the norm. What are the conditions of inclusion? So somatic norm is really central for thinking about what are the conditions of inclusion, because it points to these very subtle manifestations of exclusion. So the somatic norm is always there in different institutions. And it's a way of gauging very quickly in an instant if that person belongs or not. And that comes with a whole series of assumptions in terms of what that person can do, the capacities they have. And if you're not the somatic norm, there's a burden of doubt that could come along with you. And if the outsider makes a mistake-- that historical outsider who's not the somatic [norm] -- makes a mistake, the mistakes can be amplified. I took that kind of analysis from Frantz Fanon. When he discusses a doctor for

Martinique in Paris, he says: 7:44

if that doctor makes a slightest mistake, because he's existing in a kind of a hierarchy of supersurveillance, those mistakes will be amplified. So there's lots of consequences that ensue if you're not the somatic norm, and there's a whole load of privileges that come from being the somatic norm. You don't have to carry this burden of doubt. You don't have to claim your authority -- it's granted to you. And you don't have to -- the mistakes don't stick with you in the same way that, you know, you don't carry the mistakes. There's a lot more forgiveness if you're the somatic norm, if there are errors made. So yes, it plays out in multiple ways in institutions and beyond institutions too.

Agata Lisiak: 8:37

Doreen Massey was a space invader not only in football stadiums, as we heard at the beginning of this episode, but also in a bunch of other places where, as she wrote, "she felt that they were not [hers], or at least that they were designed to or had the effect of firmly letting [her] know [her] conventional subordination". Those places included, unsurprisingly, political organisations. Here's how she recalled her experience of working on a Labour Party policy committee in

Nirmal Puwar reading Doreen Massey: 9:09

"First, politically speaking, I came from a different planet, and thus much thought and care had to go into developing a voice that might at least have some traction in the discussion. However, apart from the problem of political position, there was also a 'culture' to negotiate. This group was by no means the worst I've come across, but what it seemed to want most from its participants was gravitas, not to say portentousness. Apart from my gut resistance to this in any case, it is difficult to exude gravitas when you're 5 ft 1 and the committee room table comes up to your chin, when you're blond, and a GIRL, who is not wearing a suit. Throughout my intermittent attempts to engage with 'the establishment' of this country I have been left in no doubt that your ideas are evaluated through a filter, unacknowledged and often unintended, of expectation of a particular kind of embodiment. You can play the required female game and smile a lot, or you can adopt a deportment that says you take yourself very, very seriously. There is a self-importance that brings out in me an overwhelming desire to prick it. It is itself a form of class and gender war.

Agata Lisiak: 10:52

I'm very much drawn to the image of Doreen Massey pricking that self importance. I can almost see her do this with a mischievous smile on her face.

Nirmal Puwar: 11:03

Yeah, I think I think you're right in that pricking moment is when she refuses. I would say it's an act of refusal, performative refusal. She doesn't want to exude gravitas. She doesn't want to pretend to mimic the establishment, and neither will she go along with the accepted scripts of femininity. So you've got to be able to -- in order to prick it -- you've got to be able to get resilience from somewhere, you've got to be able to get it from your background, through your networks, through, you know, alternative philosophies, which Doreen Massey was doing all of that in that instance. In fact, my mom was even shorter than 5 ft 1, and she had a lot of gravitas. And she didn't acquire it from class, but she had, I would say she had presence. She had presence in the situation, she wouldn't let people knock her over, and she stated the case. But she was also known for being an incredibly loving person not only to her children and grandchildren, but in the neighbourhood. But she stood her ground. It's hard to do both, especially when people are very, very quick to find a reason to knock you off balance from being in places of authority.

Agata Lisiak: 12:29

We finished our tea and went for a walk through Coventry, the West Midlands city, where Nirmal grew up and where she returned several years ago to be close to her elderly mother who has since passed away. Even though Nirmal knows every corner of her hometown, she keeps discovering new things about it. Most recently, she has been taking exploratory walks with artists and botanists. She also roams the city with her little daughter. You can read about their walks in an essay we'll link to in the episode notes. Our walk took us all the way to Coventry's most iconic building.

Nirmal Puwar: 13:10

Well, Agata, I'm glad I could bring you here to Coventry Cathedral, and we're in the Chapel of Unity. It's a circular space with pieces that come off in a star shape, full of stained glass of different colours. So this is what's called the New Cathedral. The chapel is part of incredibly large new cathedral that we're in and it was created after German Luftwaffe in World War Two bombed the city. It was called the Moonlight Sonata exercise because they lit up the city with bombardment. It was a city where a lot of industry was made so industries that would have supported the war effort, munitions, and 70% of the city centre, the infrastructure, was ripped out. I should say, after this, it's argued that Coventry was used as an excuse by Winston Churchill to totally obliterate Dresden, which really went up in flames and the loss of life there was huge, way beyond what we lost here. So after the war, there was a discussion because the cathedral itself was bombed and the roof fell down. There was discussion of what do we do? Do we fix this cathedral? Do we make a new cathedral? A lot of discussion in terms of the architectural style and at that moment there was a move across Europe to create modernist structures for churches. Other people wanted a gothic, neogothic building, but the modernist structure went forward. And it was designed by Basil Spence, it's a very famous piece of architecture and you will see it has stained glass in different artistic formations. Yeah, so I grew up in this city and was very familiar with the ruins where I'd just go for contemplation, have a cup of tea, to have your sandwich. And this was quite a civic space, the cathedral as well. I don't know if you know, but Duke Ellington performed here in the 60s, as did Ravi Shankar. And some of those histories are now being revisited, especially with Duke Ellington.

Agata Lisiak: 16:02

It seems to me that Coventry Cathedral is quite well known nationwide, isn't it, in the UK? So is it a place about which school children will learn in history books? What is this place in British cultural memory?

Nirmal Puwar: 16:19

Yeah. When it was first opened, there was so many visitors, there are so many visitors because it seemed to be a site of remembrance, but also sight of reconciliation, peace and reconciliation. And I know coach loads of children used to come. I don't know if that's still the case, actually, nationally, and I certainly don't know if it's in the history books. Yeah, so it's hope, power revisiting. And it's a strong narrative of how we do remember World War and how we go forward, I guess. I suppose I've been interested in it because my father was in World War Two. In the Indian-British colonial army. He fought all over the place, you know, Middle East, Burma, he was there, came to Cyprus, he lost a brother on the battlefield in Benghazi, and then, he's a very common story. He came to the UK in the post-war period. Sawarn Singh was his name. He came in 1957. And at that time, you know, Cathedral's being built and then it was consecrated with a very, very big opening. Benjamin Britten wrote a new piece called The War Requiem, which featured Japan in it, Germany in it, but, interestingly, the colonies were not referenced, even though India provided the largest'volunteer army' -- so-called 'volunteer army' -- in World War Two. And a lot of those people from the colonies were filling the city as well. They were coming to work in engineering trades, in the motor trade. But there was a disjuncture between the narrative that sits with the cathedral and the personal

stories: 18:22

personal, global, political stories of people who came to live in this city. And certainly there was... I couldn't make any sense of the narratives of war that came to Cathedral and the documents my father had at home, that him and my mother had carried over, references to being in the British Army, in the colonial army in World War Two. So there was that disjuncture there. And I think I had been a sociologist for over twenty years, when I turned to this as a personal, but also, I would say, political project. I'd taught and studied courses on ethnicity, race, nationhood and, at that point, I was kind of tired of only writing articles. I wanted a public intervention in this space so that we recognise a global contribution, postcolonial contribution, colonial contribution to the war, and to reroute the narratives that come with the site. So yes, we worked as a team on a project called Noise of the Past, which began with the architecture of the Cathedral. I guess it's a response to the Cathedral and the narratives of the Cathedral. And we instituted a method called call and response, which comes out of oral history traditions as well as for folklore traditions where one person says something, the other one replies and there's a back and forth. So we placed that into a methodology in our project and it started with a poetic exchange between my father and his grandson (my nephew) in Urdu where he's asked about his time in war, the loss of his brother, the lack of recognition in the UK in the, you know, annual calendar that comes with services for remembrance.

Unraveling: 20:27

[Fragment of Unraveling, a 2008 film written and directed by Kuldip Powar, music by Nitin Sawhney, produced by Nirmal Puwar and Sanjay Sharma.]

Nirmal Puwar: 20:47

So this poetic exchange in Urdu was recorded and given to Nitin Sawhney, the musician Nitin Sawhney, he created a new score for it. Then Kuldip Powar, the poet, actually took the score and created a film to the score, and that became Unravelling.

Unraveling: 21:15

[Fragment of Unraveling, a 2008 film written and directed by Kuldip Powar, music by Nitin Sawhney, produced by Nirmal Puwar and Sanjay Sharma.]

Nirmal Puwar: 21:44

Then we had a second new piece created called Postcolonial War Requiem where my colleague Francis Silkstone from the Music Department at Goldsmiths decided he wanted to work with Kuldip and my father's poetry -- The Poetic Exchange-- and he visited the Cathedral with us many times. So he responded to it with a new composition which was called Postcolonial War Requiem. Both pieces were premiered in the Cathedral here in November, in 2008. November is a season, I guess, of remembrance. The response was amazing. The press didn't cover it -- although I spoke on local radio -- but the mixed audience responded amazingly. In fact, there was someone who said -- stood up, connected to the Cathedral and said -- "I sung in the Benjamin Britten choir when the Cathedral was inaugurated". And he said, "Never before have I seen such a multicultural plurality of people in the place, and of languages in the performance". So that in itself was a major achievement. I think the assemblage that we created was important. But I guess the legacy also can very easily fall away.

Agata Lisiak: 23:24

You mentioned briefly that sometimes in the process of preparing and staging the intervention, you felt like space invaders. But the project itself, it seems to me, is also very much in the spirit of space invading. Maybe you could reflect on this a little bit.

Nirmal Puwar: 23:44

Yes, it's an active verb -- space invading. It's space invading narratives of war, narratives of remembrance, the erasure of the global presence in these world wars, and including the local erasure. So it's space invading in the architectural [space] and words that managed to keep people out of the imagination of who participated in these wars. Where are they now? That lack of remembrance of the global import in World War One and Two, to be honest. Space invading is a deliberate action that you take in order to disrupt how that space has been demarcated, the narrative that comes with it, it may be the borders that come with it, and it's an active process. So we enacted a creative, artistic, sociological process to alter -- to invade -- the narratives that come with war and remembrance in the national and local calendar of remembrance. That was a deliberate invasion. We did it creatively, we did it poetically, we did it very carefully. I wouldn't say it was a riot, you know, we worked with poetry, music, film, and altered the vision -- so it goes beyond the nation -- of how we remember the war dead. And so that we also don't just support militarism, nationalism; we think of it in the current global context as well of new wars, and how do we remember the war dead, of which wars. Interesting, you can hear that sound in the background from the choir that's being practiced at the moment. So within that we brought in Urdu voices, we brought in multicultural languages that are in the city, but then hardly ever in the Cathedral.

Agata Lisiak: 26:09

So do you see this intervention as part of this larger movement to disrupt the imperialist history, to prick the mainstream commemorative practices that are so strongly connected to whiteness and the empire?

Nirmal Puwar: 26:27

Totally, that's what it's placed at, that's how its space invading. It's what's Stuart Hall calls the cultural amnesia of empire. We also don't want to just be added in to those stories of war and remembrance. We want to disrupt notions of war and military, how is the nation nation made? So the prick is quite deep, and it gets at the heart of how narratives of nationhood are produced. Because there are soldiers remembered from different parts of the world, but often it's buttressed towards the establishment. So, yeah, nationalism in itself is not questioned, militarism isn't questioned. And I guess our prick is a bit similar to Doreen Massey, when she doesn't want to, you know, come with a gravitas. So we don't want the gravitas of militarism. We don't want that. We don't want the gravitas of nationalism. We don't just want to be colonial subjects inside that. We actually want to burst the bubble of how the nation is produced in the first place.

Agata Lisiak: 27:53

Coming from Poland, I'm familiar with churches as spaces where narratives of the nation are produced. But instead of invading that space, instead of pricking its portentousness, I simply opted out. I left both the country and the church. And I don't regret it. But I'm also deeply moved by Nirmal's intervention. It's defiant, poetic, intimate.

Nirmal Puwar: 28:22

I would say this is a very personal project. I feel it in the fabric of my bones. When we -- at that time, I don't think it'd be the case now, there's different personnel involved in the Cathedral -- when we felt like space invaders during the practice, during the programming, some of my team actually wanted to pull out and not do the launch of Unraveling and Postcolonial War Requiem in the Cathedral. I was totally

committed that I must intervene in that space: 28:52

it's my space, it's not just a religious space, it's a civic space. And if we had found it impossible to do something inside, I was thinking of some kind of guerrilla projection outside. So it's also a project that's intergenerational, you know, it connects my parents' generation that lived under colonialism with my generation who were born in the UK, and it is a very important intergenerational exchange of death, war, colonialism, Britishness -- to have an expanded notion of Britishness. Yeah, it is the most personal project I've ever done. And even standing here now, I can feel it in my skin and my bones.

Agata Lisiak: 29:53

The intervention not only unravels the exclusionary narratives of nationhood, but it also has a powerful local resonance. In Noise of the Past, Nirmal Puwar and

her collaborators defiantly insisted on the obvious: 30:04

the Cathedral belongs to them too. Their artful acts of space invading are fueled by thoughtful reflection and careful intergenerational engagement. They offer endless inspiration for future interventions, and they're also a prescription of sorts.

After all, space invading can be a healing practice: 30:26

it enables us to process painful experiences. In this episode, we've looked at various examples of space

invading: 30:39

from Doreen Massey on football terraces through marginalised bodies in Parliament to a postcolonial intervention in Coventry Cathedral. We'd love to hear your stories too. Are you a space invader? Please click on the form in the episode notes to share your experiences with us. That's also where you'll find links to Nirmal Puwar's essays on walking and other interesting links. And for those of you who understand Spanish, make sure to check out our episode on Doreen Massey in Venezuela hosted by Erick Moreno Superlano. You'll find it, along with the rest of our series, on your favourite podcast app. Special Delight is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and hosted by the Sociological Review Foundation. Visit the podcast page at thesociologicalreview.org to find the transcript and a list of reading recommendations. This episode was brought to you by Susan Stone, Reece Cox, Adèle Martin, Bose Sarmiento and me, Agata Lisiak. Special thanks to our guest Nirmal Puwar, and thank you for listening