Full Description
Desert Imaginations traces the cultural and intellectual histories that have informed the prevalent ideas of deserts across the globe. The book argues that Saharanism—a globalizing imaginary that perceives desert spaces as empty, exploitable, and dangerous—has been at the center of all desert-focused enterprises. Encompassing spiritual practices, military thinking, sexual fantasies, experiential quests, extractive economies, and experimental schemes, among other projects, Saharanism has shaped the way deserts not only are constructed intellectually but are acted upon. From nuclear testing to border walls, and much more, Brahim El Guabli articulates some of Saharanism's consequential manifestations across different deserts. Desert Imaginations draws on the abundant historical literature and cultural output in multiple languages and across disciplines to delineate the parameters of Saharanism. Against Saharanism's powerful and reductive vision of deserts, the book rehabilitates a tradition of desert eco-care that has been at work in desert Indigenous people's literary, artistic, scholarly, and ritualistic practices.
Contents
Contents
Preface
List of Abbreviations
Note on Transliteration and Translation
Introduction: Genealogies and Manifestations of Saharanism
1. Spiritual Saharanism: The Desert as a Fanatical, Racialized Space
2. Extractive Saharanism: Everything in Deserts Is Extractable!
3. Experimental Saharanism: Deserts as a Testing Ground
4. Sexual Saharanism: Transgression and Impunity in the Desert
5. "Unity of Creatures": Saharanism Meets Desert Ecocare
Epilogue: Desert Legalese, Art, and the Path Forward
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
