1 White Discourse, Memory and Hierarchies of Belonging. Georgie Wemyss Paper Presented at Colloque régional et international organisé par le laboratoire CITERES (CNRS –UMR 6173) et l’Université François Rabelais de Tours. 29 th June 2011 Abstract This paper explores how the dominant discourse about Britishness, and its pivotal element, the ‘Invisible Empire’ works to exclude local Bengalis from fully ‘belonging’ to east London and national collectivities. The ‘Invisible Empire’ refers to the various discursive omissions of the violence and oppression of the British Empire. I use Trouillot’s notion of historical narrative as a particular ‘bundle of silences’ to explore how silences about histories of Bengali people in Britain and Bengal support both the ethnicization of the category ‘white working class’ and construct a racialized ‘hierarchy of belonging’. I demonstrate how the nineteenth century colonial categorization of Asian seafarers as ‘lascars’ in British merchant shipping legislation denied south Asian men the same rights as white men on board ship and the right to settle in Britain. I consider the significance of these histories and of their silencing for notions of belonging in the present. Introduction Alongside the Tower of London ‘World Heritage Site’ in east London, there is a memorial to those killed in the British Merchant Navy in the two world wars. Of the 26,833 names on the memorial very few are South Asian. This is because the memorial only records those South Asians who had managed to serve on British Articles by somehow circumventing the restrictions imposed on them that sought to prevent their settlement in Britain. The majority who died served under the racially discriminatory ‘Lascar’ Articles and the names of these men are omitted from the memorial. An estimated 6,600 Indian seafarers employed on Indian articles on British Merchant Navy ships were killed during the 1939-45 war. A further 1,022 were badly wounded and 1,217 were taken prisoners of war. 1