Empire, belonging and 'working class' identities: The silenced littoral histories of East London

When?

Wednesday 19 October 2011, 15.30 to 17.00

Where?

Room 49AC05, AC Building, University of Surrey

Open to:

Staff, Students, Public

Speaker:

Dr Georgie Wemyss

Dr Georgie Wemyss, Goldsmiths College, University of London

In this paper, I explore how contemporary silences about histories of Bengali people in Britain and colonial Bengal work to support the ethnicization of the category of ‘working class’ in London. I examine how the nineteenth century categorization of Asian merchant seamen as ‘lascars’ in British merchant shipping legislation not only denied South
Asian men the same rights as white men on board ship, but also denied them the right to settle in Britain. Histories of (often ‘illegal’) settlement and shared experiences remain hidden. The example of the discriminatory category of ‘lascar’ highlights the salience of understanding discourses of ‘class’ in a global context. The paper makes connections between activists in the docks of Kolkata and ‘lascar’ activism  on sea and land in the run up to WW2 to consider the significance of the burying of these histories for the ethnicization of the categories of ’lascar’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and of ‘working class’ in the present.

Dr Georgie Wemyss studied Geography and Anthropology at UCL and worked as a youth worker in Brick Lane during the 1980s. Since the 1990s she has taught in Tower Hamlets College whilst working on her MA and D.Phil in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex followed by an ESRC Post Doctoral Fellowship at the University
of Surrey. She is a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths. She is the author of The Invisible Empire: White Discourse, Tolerance and Belonging (Ashgate2009).