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- Convenors:
-
Hassan Ould Moctar
(SOAS)
Matthew Porges (University of Oxford)
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- Discussant:
-
Alice Wilson
(University of Sussex)
- Stream:
- Borders and Places
- Sessions:
- Friday 18 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel will explore ways in which the Sahara Desert has been experienced and interpreted by agents within and without it. Where do such perspectives converge and where do they diverge? And how do these overlapping Saharan imaginaries relate to the positions of those evoking them?
Long Abstract:
The Sahara, the world's largest non-polar desert, has often been treated as a conceptually or geographically unified space. This monolithic depiction can take the form of an externally bounded object of intervention or exploration. At the same time, however, the Sahara is an endogenously experienced environment characterised by political and cultural heterogeneity. From this point of view, any attempt at tracing external frontiers may appear less pertinent than the myriad boundaries that traverse it. In this sense, there is not a single Sahara, but rather multiple, partially overlapping Saharan imaginaries. Endogenous actors may or may not conceive of the Sahara as a unified space, or may experience different boundaries within it.
This panel seeks to explore various ways the Sahara has been interpreted and experienced by differently-positioned actors throughout its ongoing history. Our intention is not to draw out an overarching, unified conceptualisation of the Sahara, but rather to situate these perspectives in relation to one another and their socio-historical contexts. Divergences between these different perspectives are thus for our purposes just as fruitful as lines of commonality. Divergent perspectives on Saharan geography need not exist in conflict with one another, and may relate to differing spatial, temporal, utilitarian, or ecological exigencies.
Examples of the endogenous and exogenous perspectives around which we hope to elicit discussion might include those of nomadic pastoralists, colonial functionaries, European explorers, indigenous resistance movements, 18th century emirs, Sufi scholars and brotherhoods, as well as contemporary heads of state and international security actors.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 18 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the conceptualization of the Lands of the Sudan and the sub-Saharan diaspora in Ottoman Tunisia in the 1808 missive penned by the West African scholar Aḥmad b. al-Qāḍī al-Timbuktāwī.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the conceptualization of the Lands of the Sudan and the sub-Saharan diaspora in Ottoman Tunisia in the 1808 missive penned by the West African scholar Aḥmad b. al-Qāḍī al-Timbuktāwī. The missive, entitled Hatk al-sitr 'ammā 'alayhi sūdānu Tūnis min al-kufr, addressed the ruler Hammuda Pacha and the 'ulamā' of the Regency, whom al-Timbuktāwī aimed at persuading of the need to ban the religious practices of "the blacks of Tunis" led by women, which he considered un-Islamic. The detraction from practices deemed un-Islamic has a long history in Islamicate writing, and women's participation in them has often been used to link them to immorality and apocalyptic consequences. This paper presents al-Timbuktāwī's admonition within this genealogy as well as indicative of the political situation at the turn of the century in both the Sudan and Tunisia. Not in the slightest degree, the missive was a reaction against the Tunisian tolerance to sub-Saharans' possession cults which jīhād leaders in West and Central Africa were endeavoring to ban in the aftermath of the Fulani war and the establishment of the Sokoto caliphate (1804-8). In Hausaland, a region where many of the sub-Saharan slaves brought into Tunisia originated from, jīhād leaders considered bori rituals polytheistic and used heavily gendered discourses to condemn them, just like al-Timbuktāwī. The paper reads the gender normative tone of the missive against the grain in order to investigate not only al-Timbuktāwī's view on the black diasporic community(mainly slaves), but that of the Husaynid rulers and Tunisian society.
Paper short abstract:
Laâyoune/El Aaiún is a peculiar urban formation. As the largest city in the disputed territory of Western Sahara, it has been shaped largely through a series of unresolved political projects engendered by expectations of decolonization.
Paper long abstract:
Put differently, the city serves as the spatial expression of repeated efforts to fix, mobilize, displace, and abandon political subjects in the name of decolonization. This paper will examine how the city’s nomenclature indexes a series of efforts to colonize and decolonize the Sahara through urbanization, from Morocco’s Liberation Army in the 1950s to Spanish colonial rule in the 1960s to the decades-old Moroccan-Sahrawi conflict. These incomplete political projects of decolonization have left their mark on the nomenclature and built environment of Laâyoune/El Aaiún in a manner expressive of an intertwined relationship between urbanization and coercion, political commitment and ambivalence. This paper will explore how vernacular place-names throughout the city index conflicting but overlapping imaginaries that construct the Sahara as both a frontier of unlimited opportunity and a territory that requires spatial confinement in order to govern.
Paper short abstract:
The Sahara/Desert, the vast arid land that connects North Africa to sub-Saharan Africa, is an undertheorized place. Cast as an inherently dangerous, marginal and peripheral space, the Sahara has been mostly defined by what it is not or what it should be like, instead of what it actually is.
Paper long abstract:
Even today, travel literature, explorers’ accounts, and drilling companies’ reports deploy facile imaginaries of the desert that were forged in the precolonial and colonial periods to depict the desert as a place to be explored, dissected, exploited, used, and tamed, without any regard for the millennial knowledge its inhabitants have produced and transmitted about it. From René Caillié (1799 –1838) to Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) and André Gide (1869-1951), a motley of writers, explorers, adventurers, divine prophecy followers, geologists, and colonialists gravitated towards the Sahara. Fascinated and mesmerized by the desert’s power, these individuals’ lives were consumed by the endeavor to penetrate this mythologized space. Nowadays, a prime example of this practice is the notorious Paris-Dakar Rally, which since 1978 built on cliché imaginations of the desert to offer its wealthy participants the opportunity to relive the European penetration of Africa through the desert—this time in fast cars and motorcycles. However, understanding these endeavors requires the examination of the larger discursive practice and knowledge production that undergirds them. This paper proposes ‘Saharanism’ as a concept that subsumes the various ways in which the Sahara is written about, deployed, imagined, and represented in Euro-American cultural production. Instead of focusing solely on the present manifestations of Saharanism, the paper delves into a plethora of literary, anthropological, and reconnaissance writings that have underlain Saharanists’ practices since the 18th century.
Saharanism offers a framework through which desert studies can understand and deconstruct the origins and continuation of the imaginaries, which the mere mention of the word ‘desert’ evokes. I draw on the life story of Jacques Lebaudy, the self-declared Emperor of the Sahara, and Jack Mortimer Sheppard’s travelogue Sahara Adventure as well as Carlo Carretto’s epistolary book Letters from the Desert to examine how Saharanism undergirds, informs, and shapes the attitudes and endeavors of these explorers and writers. By investigating their intellectual genealogies to former explorers and writers who inspired their own work, the paper shows how Saharanism has its own set of references, genealogies, traditions, and imaginaries that are transmitted from generation to generation, across times and spaces, and intellectual schools.
Paper long abstract:
Why do Saharan spaces have the quality of feeling remote, how is this perception generated, and who is most likely to feel it? Why are Saharan nations continuously portrayed as unknowable, static and empty, when they are cross-cut by dynamic networks of exchange and figure prominently in the global imagination as zones of discovery, rich in symbolic and material resources? This paper works through two problems that arose during my ethnographic fieldwork in Mauritania, both of them related to conditions of life in the Sahara that produce dialogical and highly distinctive processes of spatial imagination
First, I consider how villagers in Mauritania's southeastern Hodh province experience the Ṣaḥra as removed, imaginary, and poetic. For example, I found that lexical categories in Hassaniyya related to ecological features are embedded in historical and moral narratives that imaginatively transpose the Arabian Desert onto the Sahara, situating local notions of environment and community within a totalizing, transregional conception of spacetime. I describe this figure of spacetime as a"Quranic Chronotope."
Second, I analyze how perspectives of Saharan spaces that emphasize enchantment and the peripheral attract external actors, such as government agents, developers, and anthropologists, whose projects often reproduce the very conditions of remoteness that made the region alluring in the first place. Thus, internal and external configurations of space/time combine to create the feelings of insulation from historical transformation and social change that characterize regions like the Sahara.