Deserts Are Not Empty

by Samia Henni (Editor), Alla Vronskaya (Contributor), Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Contributor)

Colonial and imperial powers have often portrayed arid lands as “empty” spaces ready to be occupied, exploited, extracted, and polluted. Despite the undeniable presence of human and nonhuman lives and forces in desert territories, the “regime of emptiness” has inhabited, and is still inhabiting, many imaginaries. Deserts Are Not Empty challenges this colonial tendency, questions its roots and ramifications, and remaps the representations, theories, histories, and stories of arid lands―which comprise approximately one-third of the Earth’s land surface. The volume brings together poems in original languages, conversations with collectives, and essays by scholars and professionals from the fields of architecture, architectural history and theory, curatorial studies, comparative literature, film studies, landscape architecture, and photography. These different approaches and diverse voices draw on a framework of decoloniality to unsettle and unlearn the desert, opening up possibilities to see, think, imagine it otherwise.


With contributions from Saphiya Abu Al-Maati, Menna Agha, Asaiel Al Saeed, Aseel AlYaqoub, Yousef Awaad Hussein, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Danika Cooper, Brahim El Guabli, Timothy Hyde, Jill Jarvis, Bongani Kona, Dalal Musaed Alsayer, Observatoire des armements, Francisco E. Robles, Paulo Tavares, Alla Vronskaya, and XqSu.

Genres: Nonfiction, Poetry, Environment, Academic, Anthologies

384 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2022

Reviews

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Deserts can certainly be dangerous places, but empty, they are not. The increasing danger of deserts, however, is largely due to the biopolitical and practical effects of sovereign borders, which seek to reshape long-standing migration and economic patters that precede the very idea of nation-states. Look at how the US-Mexico border has become defined in so many ways by migrant death: these deaths are manufactured by the combination of competing state and economic interests with the coerced traversal of dangerous desert terrains.

Emptiness is not only a means of refusing to acknowledge who lives in deserts, as well as the incredibly important and environmentally necessary flora and fauna of deserts-it's also a means of asserting and proving dominant cultural ideas ... the desert becomes a place where men go to prove that they're men, where white people go to prove that they're white, where survival means proof of one's worth."

...

"Emptiness is neither a geographical category nor an ecological feature; it is a culturally constructed, political instrument. When visualized through cartographic drawing, 'emptiness' directs the perception of deserts, their ecologies, and the people who occupy them, and validates the social and ecological exploitation of desert environments. Mapping emptiness manipulates the perception of deserts; drawing the desert as a landscape of voids, gaps, and blank spots that suggests that there is nothing there to pay attention to, simultaneously rendering invisible the past and present systems of exploitation occurring in desert landscapes. Discourses of deserts as empty, alongside the maps that spatialize this emptiness, have undergirded the United State's historic and contemporary imperial practices of territorial occupation and acquisition that encourage land dispossession, resource extraction, inequitable land use, and zoning practices."

***

We call deserts unproductive and then milk them for all they're worth, we call them empty and then force out the indigenous people who live in them, we call them barren and then kill the ecosystems that have always existed. Perhaps we just need a new way of looking and understanding.

A new favorite. This was amazing. Every essay was incredible.

[Sofia Leoni · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that reflects on the implication of “emptiness” as a term that needs a collective rethinking. Deserts are a just a case study to be overcome.