Nirwal Puwar: 'Fish in and out of water: a theoretical framework of race and the space of academ

Abstract: Although the numbers of people of colour working in academia as staff has increased over recent years (Carter et al, 1999), they are still very much a minority, especially in senior positions. They are rather like Pollard’s pictures of black people in the countryside: out of place. The whiteness of the normative figure of leadership within academia, and the fact that as, Theo Goldberg says, whites are the ‘ghosts of modernity’ (1997: 83) is made most apparent by the presence of staff of colour. They are not the somatic norm. The rest of this chapter examines why not