Brahim El Guabli, Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences. California: University of California Press, 2025, 330 pp.

Liz Matsushita
Reed College

The introduction to Brahim El Guabli’s innovative study begins with the simple line: “This is not a book about the history of deserts. It is rather a history of ideas about deserts” (1). Yet this is more than an apt description of what he accomplishes in this rich and generative work. Over the course of five chapters, El Guabli invites the reader to consider “Saharanism” – a discursive concept he coins that is akin to, but distinct from, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) – as a global phenomenon.[1] El Guabli specifically addresses the overlaps and gaps that characterize the relationship between Orientalism and Saharanism. For him, “Orientalism is no longer the appropriate way to approach the study of Tamazgha, because it imposes a framework on a region that has its own cultural specificity” (53). For El Guabli, the specific histories of the Sahara and the cultures of the Indigenous peoples who live there require their own set of analytical tools. At the same time, he adeptly demonstrates that colonial, neocolonial, and nation-statist engagements with the Sahara as an “actual” space birthed a set of powerful ideas that continue to materially and ideologically shape interactions with deserts across the world. Like Said’s “Orient,” the Sahara comes to serve as a referent for deserts in places as diverse as the U.S., China, Australia, Palestine/Israel, and beyond; really, any part of the globe that has its own “arid lands,” and, with them, an identifiable collection of inherited tropes.

These tropes are likely immediately familiar to the reader: deserts as empty, uninhabited, unproductive; deserts as permissive, available, extractable; deserts as, in many ways, the uncivilized Other to a Euro-American topographic imaginary. Yet few texts have sought to comprehensively catalog these sets of ideas and ground them in the real and material history of the Sahara. As such, this book broaches an important and still under-discussed subject. A brief history of the genesis of Saharanism opens up a welcoming space for future scholars to take up unexplored aspects of desert encounters, in Tamazgha and beyond.

Desert Imaginations builds on a small but growing body of humanistic and social scientific literature that critically engages with desert landscapes, including work by Diana Davis and Samia Henni, as well as El Guabli’s own work as part of the Desert Futures Collective.[2] One of the major contributions of the text is defining “Saharanism,” or rather, as El Guabli details over the first four chapters, a plural set of “Saharanisms” – spiritual, sexual, extractive, experimental. Taken together, Saharanism/s offers a robust and multifaceted framework through which to understand desert histories. El Guabli draws on a dizzying array of sources, ranging from literary, historical, and cartographic archives to contemporary films, festivals, and news reporting. The final chapter poignantly centers “desert eco-care” as a counter-discourse to Saharanism’s exploitative, violent, and anthropocentric treatment of deserts, utilizing Indigenous voices to productively shift our frames of understanding.

Each chapter constitutes its own stand-alone contribution to Saharan and desert studies. In Chapter 1: Spiritual Saharanism, El Guabli traces Christian interactions with the Sahara, dating from the ascetic Desert Fathers of old to the transformative shift towards weaponized forms of spirituality in the French colonial era. Spiritual Saharanists like Charles de Foucauld and Cardinal Lavigerie reimagined the desert as a space on the final frontiers of Christian civilization. Their evangelical projects in the Sahara served as a kind of vanguard for the French expansionism with which they were intimately aligned. For Lavigerie in particular, the Sahara served as “a barrier between the worlds of Christian civilization and Islamic savagery, slavery, and the desire to shed Christian blood” (48) – a point of view that, as El Guabli notes, continues to undergird Islamophobic discourse to this day. Chapter 2: Extractive Saharanism denotes another strategic shift in colonial desert ideology with the post-WWII French move to “readminister” the Sahara as a new territory, in the face of decolonization and the fracturing of their authority across Tamazgha. Maintaining the Sahara as a separate, but unified, entity facilitated continued French control of vital desert land, believed to hold a wealth of valuable minerals, oil, and other extractable resources, including labor.

Chapter 3, “Experimental Saharanism,” is particularly effective. It argues for the unspoken understanding of deserts as available, sacrificial spaces for all manner of technological experimentation, a place devoid of life forms, or at least a place whose human and nonhuman inhabitants are of lesser import than the imperative to scientific progress. This includes the infamous French nuclear tests that occurred in Reggane and the Hoggar in the 1960s, a topic well-treated in existing literature but, as El Guabli argues, missing “analysis of the logic and ideational apparatus that enabled these tests to take place the way they did” (117). The selection of desert environments for dangerous nuclear tests was also a global phenomenon: the Nevada Test Site in the U.S. Southwest, the Australian desert, the Kazakhstan desert all underwent bombing experiments that irradiated the landscape and sickened its inhabitants, all centered on the shared premise of deserts as “lifeless” spaces. El Guabli writes that this goes hand in hand with a perception of deserts as being “out of step with modern time”: “It is within this gap between what has been, what is, and what might be done in the future that experimental Saharanism has survived.” (106) Beyond nuclear testing, experimental Saharanism has engendered the use of deserts as testing grounds for myriad projects, from military training and automobile racing to botanical experiments. All of these treatments stem from a specific disdain for desert inhabitants and environments, as spaces that are “inherently sacrificeable” (100).

Chapter 4: “Sexual Saharanism” critiques a long tradition of whitewashing the legacies of Euro-American authors like André Gide (Oscar Wilde and Paul Bowles are also mentioned) whose admitted acts of pedophilia in Tamazgha are largely overlooked or dealt with dismissively in hagiographic literary scholarship. Modern scholars have often focused on celebrating their groundbreaking writings about homosexuality, which, it should be mentioned, must absolutely be decoupled from any natural link to pedophilia. In fact, these positive portrayals of authors who engaged in sexual acts with children in colonial spaces rather reinforce that harmful connection. Instead, El Guabli argues that Gide’s sexual adventurism was intimately rooted in notions about the Sahara as a sexually permissive and available space for all manner of otherwise taboo activities, a “moral terra nullius” (136). To demonstrate this, he traces a history of such sexual engagements dating to 19th-century French encounters with the Ouled Naïl women of Algeria, who were misleadingly portrayed as prostitutes, spawning an entire sub-genre of erotic colonial literature, and arriving at the present with invocations of “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” the Burning Man Festival’s utopian alternative space, and the sci-fi series “Westworld,” not to mention ongoing sex tourism in the Sahara.

On the above, if the book suffers from one flaw, it may be the sometimes overwhelming nature of its wealth of information and sources, which occasionally produces gaps or repetitions in discussion. This does not detract at all, however, from its central premise and indeed may be a corollary to it: that Saharanism has been a critical, much under-discussed, mechanism in colonial and statist administrations of desert landscapes globally, one that has had material, harmful effects on the peoples who inhabit them. This powerful argument grounds the narrative through the text’s temporal and geographical leaps, building our understanding as it gestures towards these seemingly endless manifestations.

The book ends with a fifth chapter, “the culmination of the book,” which, in an intentional contradistinction to the previous chapters, centers Indigenous knowledge-making and living relationships with the desert as an antidote to the flattening, extractive, violent worldview of Saharanism. Focusing on the work of two Arabophone writers, Abdelrahman Munif and Ibrahim al-Koni, El Guabli utilizes al-Koni’s concept of “the unity of creatures” (wahdat al-ka’inat) as “an ethics of living in the desert not as a parasitic agent whose own survival outweighs all other life but as one who can only be when and if all creatures are equally afforded the same right to be.” (174) This notion of ecocare is the functional opposite of Saharanism and serves as a hopeful ending note, beckoning the reader to unlearn Saharanism in favor of a desert-centric approach that takes these peoples and environments on their own terms.

El Guabli’s contribution to global, interdisciplinary desert studies is undeniable, and functions as an opening for many potential future studies. The book is also a fantastic teaching resource for those offering African, SWANA, or colonial history courses, and indeed also for those in other disciplines or geographies wherever they touch upon desert environments. As El Guabli points out in the brief epilogue, arid lands constitute roughly 33% of the world’s surface – thus even for those who have never set foot in a desert, desert ideologies have in one way or another intersected with all of our histories. This book constitutes a vital first step towards rectifying the ongoing misrecognitions of deserts, understanding them instead as inhabited, diverse, and historically central spaces

[1] Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage Books, 1978).

[2] Diana Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (MIT Press, 2016); Samia Henni, ed., Deserts Are Not Empty (Columbia University Press, 2022).