1st Edition
Storied Deserts Reimagining Global Arid Lands
Storied Deserts makes a crucial and critical intervention in the field of environmental humanities by showcasing an emerging body of research on desert places from around the world.
Deserts, despite dominant stereotypes of wasteland and barrenness, are culturally and ecologically abundant places. This edited volume sets out to reimagine the world’s desert places and the very concept of ‘the desert’ itself, taking a boldly interdisciplinary and multicultural approach. Authors engage in literary ecocriticism and ecopoetics, film and visual studies, critical theory, personal and transdisciplinary reflection, creative practices, and historical scholarship. Through their diverse range of perspectives, contributors show how arid lands have been and can be understood as sites of narrative production, places where signs and imaginaries are born from the materialities of space and entanglement. In this way, the volume highlights how the storied matter of the Earth’s deserts informs lived realities, environmental histories, cinematic and literary imaginaries, political conflicts, and even intellectual categories such as ‘the human’ and ‘the elemental’.
Ultimately, this book shows that reimagining desert places can help us to grapple with the epochal challenges of the Anthropocene. It is an important and engaging collection for scholars and students across disciplines that helps establish the value of desert humanities.
Introduction
Celina Osuna and Aidan Tynan
Part One: Elemental Narratives
1. A Duel in the Sand: On Cinematic Spectacle in Arid Lands
Daniel Mann
2. The Dark, Dead Corners of the Earth: The Imaginary of the Antarctic as “Deserta”
Rune Graulund
3. Deserts of Doom, Spaces of Potential: Representations of the Desert in the Australian Imagination
Lesley Hawkes
4. “Blinded by the Light”: Exploring the Desert as Luminous Landscape
Claudia Rosenhan
Part Two: Poetics of Aridity
5. Revisiting Palai: Imaginings of Arid Lands in Tamil Literary and Cultural Texts
Chitra Sankaran and Gayatri Thanu Pillai
6. Yawp from Atop the Desert Sand: The Poetics of Existentialism in Jāhiliya Poetry and Beyond
Alireza Korangy
7. Exploring “y Paith”: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Desert Environments in Patagonia, Argentina
Hywel M. Griffiths, Stephen Tooth and Gabriel Kaless
8. Parched Poetics: Disarticulations from a Desert
Gretchen E. Henderson
Part Three: Land: Politics of Belonging
9. Combatting Desertification and Narrating Environmental Crisis in the United Nations
Veronika Kratz
10. The Atacama Desert: Environmental Imagery from Presumably Void Geographies Between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean Cliffs
Andrea Casals Hill and Pablo Chiuminatto
11. From Handback to Landback: Lessons from Uluru
Tom Lynch
12. Borderlands Ecologies: Informed Imaginaries in Signs Preceding the End of the World and Encantado
Celina Osuna
13. “Palmas Ultimas,” “Desert Surroundings,” and “Sonora, Mexico”
Anna Flores and Elexus Lopez
Coda
Celina Osuna and Aidan Tynan
Biography
Celina Osuna is a scholar and an artist. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, and her research, with an emphasis on Indigenous and Latinx Environmentalisms, explores aesthetics of desert places in literature, art, and film and their impacts on cultural imagination and geopolitical relationships to land. Her monograph, Desert Distortion, is forthcoming.
Aidan Tynan is Senior Lecturer in English literature at Cardiff University. He is the author of two monographs, Deleuze’s Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms (2012) and The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics (2020). He has published two edited volumes, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature (2015) and Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money (2017).
