How contemporary writers and filmmakers from across the African Sahara confront the colonial ideology of desert emptiness.

Jill Jarvis’s The Desert Is Alive challenges the image of the Sahara desert as a historical and cultural blank zone through a new “aesthetic cartography” that combines literary and film study with interdisciplinary thinking about space, borders, and infrastructures. In fields that still bear the imprint of a French colonial mindset, the Sahara has long been overlooked as a site of intellectual and cultural vitality. The Desert Is Alive breaks with a longstanding conceptual divide between “North” and “Subsaharan” Africa by resolutely centering the African Sahara and recognizing that the desert is not just full, but “peopled” in unexpected ways. 

Jarvis accounts for colonial transformations of Saharan land during the twentieth century, attesting to the tactical and symbolic allure that this desert’s purported “emptiness” has held for French empire-building. Jarvis also considers how such tactics have been repurposed by postcolonial states. She takes up the last manuscript composed by Swiss writer Isabelle Eberhardt, who died in a flood at Aïn Sefra, Algeria in 1904, and examines the first novel published by French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, composed while he worked as a pilot at Tarfaya, Morocco, in order to build the first trans-Saharan flight line during the 1920s. Jarvis then explores depictions of Timbuktu (Mali) and Nouadhibou (Mauretania) in films by Mauritanian-French director Abderrahmane Sissako. Jarvis concludes with chapters that unfold the unfinished history of French nuclear violence in the Sahara. First, she discusses multimedia and documentary works that reckon with the enduring impact of the seventeen nuclear bombs that France detonated in the Algerian desert in the 1960s. Finally, Jarvis turns to works by Tuareg poet and artist Hawad that confront the ongoing legacy of uranium mining on Indigenous land in northern Niger. The result is a rich contribution to Francophone cultural studies, African studies, postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism.