Un/Silencing the ‘Undesirables’: The Politics of Remembering and Forgetting the Forcibly Deported Chinese Immigrants in Imperial Britain

In 1946 the UK Home Office called a secret meeting on ‘Compulsory Repatriation of Undesirable Chinese Seamen’ which led to the ensuing forced deportation of thousands of Chinese immigrant seamen in Liverpool. This history remained silent in both official archives and public memory for more than half a century until a small number of the descendants of these disappeared men started to campaign for truth. It is at this historical moment of unsilencing that this research begins. Thinking with Trouillot’s writing on the production of silence and politics of memory, this paper investigates how this history was silenced in both archival sources and public memory. This paper does so by, first of all, interrogating the silences in the archives. As Trouilot (1995/2015: 51) wrote, ‘[s]ilences are inherent in the creation of sources, the first moment of historical production.’ In this sense, silences in the archive speak; they provoke critical questions of the logic of empire and state archives. Furthermore, this paper analyses how the process of racialization and dehumanision of immigrant bodies – a key epistemological apparatus of the imperial project - play a significant role in constructing and justifying the undesirability and deportability of Chinese immigrant labour. Finally, drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observations with descendants of the disappeared seamen, this paper explores how the afterlife of historical silence manifests its violence in the shape of intergenerational traumas and struggles in the process of unsilencing.