Brahim El Guabli, "Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences" (U California Press, 2025)

Jan 28, 2026

Brahim El Guabli, Associate Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins, traces Saharanism—the idea that deserts are empty, exploitable, and dangerous. He discusses how that imaginary shapes borders, extraction, migration, and so-called sacrifice zones. He also explores literary and ethical alternatives that reframe deserts as living, cared-for worlds.

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ANECDOTE

Personal Roots Sparked The Project

Brahim El Guabli traces his interest to family roots and childhood in Wurzizat and conversations with his brother about ancestral jewelry.
He realized deserts were ideological only after researching wider literary and political histories around 2009–2010.

INSIGHT

Study Ideas Not Every Desert

The book studies ideas about deserts rather than attempting an exhaustive history of every desert.
Patterns and recurring discourses reveal how deserts are reduced to emptiness, lawlessness, and extractability.

INSIGHT

Saharanism As A Distinct Ideology

Saharanism labels the ideology that frames deserts as empty, dangerous, and exploitable spaces.
Unlike Orientalism, Saharanism can be produced by anyone and operates transnationally across many deserts.

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Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences (U California Press, 2025) traces the cultural and intellectual histories that have informed the prevalent ideas of deserts across the globe. The book argues that Saharanism—a globalizing imaginary that perceives desert spaces as empty, exploitable, and dangerous—has been at the center of all desert-focused enterprises. Encompassing spiritual practices, military thinking, sexual fantasies, experiential quests, extractive economies, and experimental schemes, among other projects, Saharanism has shaped the way deserts not only are constructed intellectually but are acted upon. From nuclear testing to border walls, and much more, Brahim El Guabli articulates some of Saharanism’s consequential manifestations across different deserts. Desert Imaginations draws on the abundant historical literature and cultural output in multiple languages and across disciplines to delineate the parameters of Saharanism. Against Saharanism’s powerful and reductive vision of deserts, the book rehabilitates a tradition of desert eco-care that has been at work in desert Indigenous people’s literary, artistic, scholarly, and ritualistic practices.

In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat with Brahim El Guabli to talk about Saharanism, energy extraction, borders, and the ways deserts have been imagined as zones of sacrifice and permission. Brahim El Guabli also reflected on how these imaginaries shape migration, war, and ecological futures—from North Africa to Gaza.

Brahim El Guabli is Associate Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. He is author of Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence.

Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer based in Boston. He is the translator of Hassan Akram’s A Plan to Save the World (Sandorf Passage, 2026). His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.

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