Encountering the city: Haptic images of suburban Darwin

Photographs by research participants capture the multisensory dimension of encounters in shared public spaces that are often difficult to articulate in words. Rather than freezing the moment in stillness, these images of movement and feeling that fuse vision, sound, touch, taste and smell show how racially differentiated bodies explore the city through practices that are part of their everyday life. This paper draws on photographs and poetry by long-term residents of Aboriginal and ethnic-minority backgrounds who express what touches or happens to their bodies in open-air Asian-style markets of Darwin, a rapidly developing tropical north Australian city. Such attention to bodily encounters is central to more-than-representational and feminist approaches that affirm the diversity, materiality and vitality of urban life. In this paper I argue that Deleuzian thinking on images and Elizabeth Grosz's non-aesthetic philosophy for art contributes to this literature by providing an insight into how sensing bodies use photography and poetry to make imperceptible affective forces and matter expressive. The paper shows that such an approach is productive in thinking about the potentialities of city life for bodies of colour with different histories and geographies of racialisation.