White Spaces Network: Harnessing the power of performance, poetry and art

Because many of the network’s member countries have different histories of migration, colonisation and ethnic settlement which inform present day multicultural contexts one of our core themes is to consider what the notion of the settler means in these different national spaces.

• What does it mean to be settled somewhere, and what it means to be or to feel unsettled and out of place?
• How do we understand national belongings?

Working out answers to these questions leads the network into new domains of art and cultural representation.

One of the keynote speakers at our at our July conference Nirmal Puwar talked about the project Noise of the Past which was a sensory encounter involing poetry, historical documents, music, stone, coloth and visual art which has produced the film Unravelling and a musical performance at Coventry Cathederal. This work brought together the filmaker Kuildip Powar, the composer Francis Silkstone and the poet Sawarn Singh to create a filmic and musical dialogue around the ways in which war frames current multicultural societies.

For us in the network the questions are around how this frames the paradoxes of whiteness.