When in Camelot: Space invaders, neurodiversity and popular culture

This autobiographical reflection builds on Nirmal Puwar’s Space Invaders, where she frames women and people not racialised as white as ‘out of place’ and ‘out of space’ in white male spaces and places. For me disabled while Black, her work showed we may extend that conversation into how Critical Autism Studies, Disability Studies, and non/fiction publishing of autistic and otherwise disabled authors have been framed as white-only - those not white are seen as add-ons to the frame. Lack of ‘Black British’ disabled history, further lead me to write disability back into the history of the officially named yet stigmatising ‘Educationally Subnormal’ Scandal of the 1970s. It is also not difficult to see how ‘Educationally Subnormal’ [ESN] morphed into ableist term ‘Special Educational Needs’ [SEN]. The terminology is different but the underlying implications and inequalities remain the same. Going to school in Northants villages for near to the first fifteen years of my life, and playing cricket in those spaces for much longer, Puwar’s work may also point to the experiences of UK Black and Asian people who live and work in towns and the countryside - and in some cases may be able to trace their family history there going back many decades. My in-progress PhD research on Caribbean Northamptonshire Post-1945 takes that further in conversation with media, while I’ve also felt like a ‘space invader’ to much Black British media centralised on inner-cities - notably London. I found myself in Black characters appearing in rural period dramas, further to shows like Doctor Who and Merlin . From my rural schooling to disability and my questions of popular culture representations, these are all extended metaphors for the possibilities that we might all be space invaders in one context or another - even around people who look like us. This piece is a needed intervention showing there are a million and one ways to be human - just the mainstream is playing catchup, as per usual.