For centuries, Europeans and Euro-Americans have derided deserts as empty: while looking to the Antarctic and the Arctic, the Saraha Desert and the Arabian Desert, and North America’s Great Basin, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan Deserts, they have seen little more than blank spots on maps. For the most part, Europeans and Euro-Americans have used what they experience as emptiness as a pretext for what they celebrate as capitalism, and thus tried to fill deserts with mines, oil derricks, and other extractive infrastructures. On other occasions, however, they have made emptiness the basis not of labor but of leisure, going to deserts for carnivals of creativity like Burning Man. Against these two types of emptiness, our panel brings together four scholars who are treating deserts in all their fullness—who are treating them as material networks of human communities and more-than-human entities whose ties stretch back centuries, and who are leveraging them in imaginative inquiries that are irreducible to colonialism, capitalism, and other death-dealing frameworks. Pairing four brief presentations with an extended period for discussion, our panel will invite our colleagues to complicate standard stories of our arid planet, up to and including the Tongva stories of our LA conference site.

Our panel will begin with Francisco E. Robles interrogating an irony: insofar as deterritorialization, nomadism, nepantla, the Real, and other concepts of radical critique in hinge on the presumed emptiness of deserts, these theories treat the emptied desert as a ground zero above which bloom the desires of those who imaginatively fill it with various metaphors of instability, unfixitity, and liberation. In his talk, he will synthesize recent scholarship that understands deserts in their fullness and strangeness, linking together more specific, relational, and comparative discussions of the desert in order to note the emerging contours of a global desert studies.

After Robles’s theoretical overview, we will turn to Jill Jarvis’s geographical argument against the longstanding conceptual divide between “North” and “Subsaharan” Africa. Drawing on critical desert studies and African literary studies while also pushing against new materialist and ecocritical approaches that marginalize African and Saharan places, this she will foreground how writers, filmmakers, and artists working across the Sahara transform the reductive ways in which our planet’s largest desert has long been represented. Close attention to the affective and epistemological impacts made by transmedial works—including poetry, fiction, film, multimedia installation, music, photograph, rock etching, painting—summons their disruptive power, leaving us with the question, if Saharan land is understood to be not just densely inhabited, social, and historical but also fundamentally alive, then what else must change?

In one possible answer to this question, Carlos Alonso Nugent will turn to the deserts where the US and Mexico have refined a set of policies for killing would-be border-crossers. He will focus on the fact that in earlier eras, a Stowe or Sinclair could use exposé to effect social change, yet today, the oft-celebrated Luis Alberto Urrea, the much-maligned Jeanine Cummins, and other authors of exposés have taken prominent positions in the public sphere with little effect on migrant suffering. As an alternative to such critiques of the Deadly Desert, Nugent will use Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied to argue that Latinas/os are dissolving divides between citizens and migrants, and then turn to Ofelia Zepeda’s poems to show how the Tohono O’odham are rebuilding sacred landscapes on both sides of the border. While recognizing the incommensurability of these projects, Nugent will argue that both Latinas/os and Natives are confronting unimaginable violence by contesting conditions of imaginability.

In our last presentation, Brahim El Guabli will historicize Saharanism, a globalizing, extractive, and racializing imagination that has reduced deserts to cliches of danger, emptiness, death, and lawlessness. While this ideology has remained both unnamed and undetected for decades, he will draw on religious, sexual, and experimental endeavors in deserts to trace its genealogy and detail some of its major manifestations. Ranging from the Sahara to the Marlinga desert, he will highlight how Saharanism has been at work in the way deserts have been portrayed and (mis)treated.

With each presentation lasting at most 12 minutes, we will have at least 25 minutes for conversation among ourselves and our colleagues: thinking about the imagined environments that have become dominant as well as those that have remained less prominent, we will discuss the deserts that have been and the deserts that might yet be. We already have a diversity of voices, across gender as well as across race, with one Black scholar and two Latinx scholars; we look forward to voices of attendees.