signs in the desert : an aesthetic cartography of the sahara

Signs in the Desert: An Aesthetic Cartography of the Sahara is a book (in progress) of literary and film criticism that challenges a longstanding disciplinary divide that partitions North from Subsaharan Africa by taking the Sahara itself to be a vital center of aesthetic and intellectual creation. Drawing from the insights of spatial theory, critical cartography, and forensic architecture, I am building a case for how contemporary writers and filmmakers from across the region transform the reductive ways in which the African Sahara has long been mapped. 

In 2014, I learned that the French military detonated seventeen nuclear bombs in the Algerian Sahara between 1960 and 1966. These bombs—far stronger than those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki—left a toxic legacy whose effects have not been fully measured or studied, and whose traces have all but vanished from public knowledge. The Sahara is anything but empty; the consequences of seeing it as empty are lethal. (To listen to me speak about this early facet of my research, tune into this episode of the Maghrib podcast.)

The unsettlement provoked by knowledge of French nuclear imperialism in the Sahara prompted me to design a literary study that focuses on understanding desert spaces otherwise, and that extends recent efforts by historians and anthropologists to highlight Saharan ‘connectivity’ and microhistories. Literary scholars have yet to contribute to these efforts; my book is thus poised to correct a significant blindspot in the field. Guided by a premise that writers, filmmakers, and artists have already done more to make sense of the Sahara than have many scholars and most policymakers, I place their work at the heart of critical reflection. 

Taking off from a premise that maps are political fictions that reflect and facilitate the kind of power that renders seventeen nuclear bombs in the desert both justifiable and forgettable, this book asks : what else might happen if aesthetic works such as novels and films are taken seriously for their epistemic claims and countercartographical moves?