Deserts occupy a third of the Earth's area. They are very ubiquitous landscapes and ecologies, but they are also understood as being remote, dead, and empty. Most important, these assumptions about desert spaces have a history that scholarship has not conceptualized in terms that would make it discrete. Using the notion of "Saharanism," this talk will chart the history of ideas that has allowed different entities to do what has been done in and to deserts for a very long time. 

Brahim El Guabli is Associate Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of the award-winning book Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence (Fordham University Press, 2023) and of the recently published Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences (University of California Press, 2025).