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.