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 and author of Desert Imaginations, studies desert studies and Moroccan history. He traces Saharanism as an ideology that renders deserts empty and exploitable. Topics include energy extraction, borders and migrant deaths, deserts as sacrifice zones, literary eco-care, and how desert imaginaries shape migration, war, and ecological futures.

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INSIGHT

Deserts As Ideological Constructs

Saharanism is an ideology that frames deserts as empty, dangerous, and exploitable rather than merely a geographic fact.
Brahim El Guabli uses this concept to explain repeated policies and projects across different deserts.

ANECDOTE

Personal Roots In Wurzizat

El Guabli recounts family memories from Wurzizat and traces material culture linking his family to broader Saharan histories.
He discovered the ideological dimension of deserts through researching projects like Taqa in his hometown.

INSIGHT

Not Just Orientalism

Saharanism differs from Orientalism because it is transcontinental and practiced by many actors, not just European experts.
It normalizes actions in deserts by erasing local value and enabling extractive power relations.

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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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