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 known for work on North African history and culture, discusses his book on Saharanism. He explores how deserts are pictured as empty, exploitable, and dangerous. Conversations touch on energy extraction, borders and migrant invisibility, sacrifice zones, and storytelling as a form of desert eco-care.

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ANECDOTE

Personal Roots In Desert Politics

Brahim El Guabli traces his family roots to Wurzizat and Sahrawi heritage which shaped his interest in deserts.
He learned the ideological dimensions of deserts only after researching their histories and projects like Taqa.

INSIGHT

History Of Desert Ideas, Not Deserts Themselves

El Guabli distinguishes a history of ideas about deserts from a natural history of deserts to reveal recurring discourses and actions.
He links practices like nuclear testing and solar projects to reductive desert imaginaries that enable exploitation.

INSIGHT

Saharanism As A Transnational Ideology

Saharanism names an ideology that treats deserts as empty, lawless, dangerous, and exploitable spaces across continents.
Unlike Orientalism, Saharanism can be produced by insiders and outsiders, making it a transnational governing imagination.

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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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