The Desert is Alive: Aesthetic Cartographies of the Sahara

Please join us for the lecture by Jill Jarvis, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Yale University, titled "The Desert is Alive: Aesthetic Cartographies of the Sahara."

The Desert is Alive foregrounds the ways in which writers, filmmakers, and artists working across the African Sahara transform the reductive ways in which our planet’s largest desert has long been represented. Right now, Saharan dust particles blown by wind across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic alter sunsets and infuse ecologies throughout the global North, bearing the toxic legacy of France’s first seventeen nuclear bomb detonations across the planet. French nuclear imperialism has an enduring radioactive afterlife whose traces have been all but ghosted from the histories that many of us have been taught, even though its impact is indelible in our bones and will outlast our species. The Sahara is anything but empty or deserted, but the consequences of perceiving it as empty are lethal—not only in the past, but now and for the foreseeable future. If Saharan land is understood to be not just densely inhabited, social, and historical but also fundamentally alive, then what else must change?

BIO: Jill Jarvis is an associate professor in the Department of French and a member of the councils on African Studies and Middle East Studies at Yale University. Her new book The Desert is Alive builds a case for how writers and filmmakers from across the African Sahara confront the deadly idea that deserts are empty. With Brahim El Guabli and Francisco Robles, she is a founding member of the Desert Futures Collective.