Autochthony, Whiteness and Loss in Outer East London: Tracing the Collective Memories of Diaspora Space

This paper explores autochthony through the memory practices of in Newham, East London. It addresses how remembering East London as the home of whiteness and traditional forms of community entails powerful forms of forgetting that feed into contemporary ideas of racialised territorial belonging. Newham’s formation through migration its ‘great time’ has ensured that myths of indigeneity and whiteness have never stood still. Through engaging with young people’s and youth workers’ memory practices, the paper explores how phantasms of whiteness and class loss are traced at the same time as the migrant, a figure of racial decline, is constructed. It addresses how this tracing reveals ambivalence, porosity, and the continued allure of race. Overall, it explores how whiteness and loss develop into autochthonous forms appropriated across ethnic boundaries, and how they are mobilized to produce new forms of racial hierarchy in a ‘super-diverse’ place.