ABSTRACT
Sitting late at night at my desk, staring out of the window, I’m confronted by an image drawn from the London streets below. Adjacent to ‘Sussex House’ opposite and its Victorian oak tree, sits a bus-stop remarkable only for its ubiquity. A gentle glow emanates from it unerringly, offering low-key lighting for my projective fantasy. I’m aware as time passes that this simple, everyday image reverberates with a daunting spectrality. Geographical proximity and temporal indeterminacy combine to produce a moment of hauntological complexity: the bus-stop scene framed here is linked inexorably to another more famous one happening just half a mile down the road from me. A young Black man named Stephen Lawrence is being stabbed to death repeatedly, whilst his attackers – young white men, like me – are allowed to get off with their crime scot-free. We know the story all too well already; know of its indictment of an embittered, institutionally racist society.3 There’s little to suggest the past tense could be deployed more appropriately, little to indicate that this racist violence isn’t a constant, continuous obscenity. So looking out on the bus stop in front of me, I’m compelled to consider how it interpellates me. Though distant, I’m present nonetheless – anticipated, included as a silent witness.
