Arrested Mobilities: Affective Encounters and Crime Scenes in the City

Abstract

Drawing on insights from emergent thinking within mobility studies to focus on the banalities of everyday urban commuting, walking and other forms of unremarkable travel, this article considers everyday encounters that take place as we pass through the spaces of the city. Consideration of such mundane encounters is located within a framework attending to the interplay of affect, aesthetics, mobilities and materiality, both within the city as it is figured in literary or poetic representation and as a physical and geographical space. Focusing on the recent killing of a taxi driver in Melbourne, and on readings of Teju Cole’s novel Open City and Claudia Rankine’s poetry in Citizen, the article’s aims are two-fold. The first is a consideration of encounters in which movement through the city is arrested, halted, or brought to a standstill, whether temporarily or permanently, through racism, robbery or lethal violence, with the result that cities become agglomerations of spaces in which violence or insult has taken place – a patchwork of invisible crime scenes. Its second consideration is to propose that such arrested mobilities, and the crime scenes they engender, momentarily expose aspects of urban existence that could be called hauntological, revealing the usually obscured ghosts of the city.