Both Morocco and the Polisario Movement’s claims to the Western Sahara are built upon the concept of the nation-state, with Polisario promoting a narrative of cultural distinctiveness and Morocco pointing to a legacy of connectedness between ‘Alawite rulers and the Saharan region. As such, the Moroccan state has sponsored many studies of the 19th-century figure al-Shaikh Ma? al-?Aynayn, a Saharan leader who collaborated with the ‘Alawite Sultans in order to fight the French and Spanish invasions. The presentation of these studies frame the shaikh’s legacy as proof of the inherent unity of Morocco and its Saharan territories, while dismissing the idea of an independent Sahara as a colonial conspiracy (Zarif and bin Ma? al-?Aynayn 2013; Ja?mi?at Ibn Zuhr 2002; Zarif 2001). However, the controversy in classifying this territory actually predates Spanish and French colonialism. Even a careful examination of Ma? al-?Aynayn’s writing shows a less clear sense of belonging than the Moroccan paratexts want to impose on this figure. At the same time, taking Ma? al-?Aynayn’s acknowledgement of the distinctiveness of Saharan Arabs as proof of statehood is also ahistorical. In general, 18th and 19th-century texts from the Maghrib and the Mashriq reveal contradictory ideas of where Bilad al-Shinquit belongs, with some pinning it as part of Bilad al-Sudan and others as part of al-Maghrib (Lydon 2015). The shifts in control between the Moroccan Makhzen (central government) and areas where regional or tribal influence was more powerful add a layer of ambiguity to any neat territorial divides. It seems more likely that periods of intense communication and contact existed between what is now the Western Sahara and other parts of Morocco, as they did between this region and West Africa. For example, reading Saharan scholar Ahmed bin Tuwayr al-Janna’s account of his 1829 visit to Sultan Mawlay 'Abd al-Rahman (r. 1822- 1859) reveals the sultan to be unaware of basic aspects of life in the Saharan region (Norris 1977). Yet Mawlay 'Abd al-Rahman also went on to receive Ma? al-?Aynayn at his court and launch his political career. The aim of this paper is to give an account of how Arabic texts conceptualized the Northwestern Sahara in the centuries preceding colonialism. To this end, a general evolution of the term “Bilad al-Shinquit” will be put into dialogue with how scholars and travellers from this region portrayed their place of origin in contrast to other regions and locales.

This paper argues that the sonic and visual qualities of Abderrahmane Sissako’s films 'Timbuktu' (2014) and 'Heremakono' (2002) articulate a form of aesthetic cartography that challenges dominant frameworks by which the ancient city of Timbuktu and the vast space of the Sahara have long been represented. Recent historiographic scholarship has shown the myriad ways in which this desert has for centuries been framed by travelers, scholars, and law-makers as if it is empty, invisible, menacing, and silent—the city of Timbuktu has itself become the proper name of city so remote and unreal that it now sounds to many like a fiction. By taking Sissako’s celebrated (and controversial) films as a focal point, my intervention extends the insights of new scholarship on Saharan connectivity into literary and aesthetic studies. Originally titled 'Timbuktu, le chagrin des oiseaux' (the sorrow of the birds), Sissako’s 'Timbuktu' depicts that city’s occupation by Ansar al-Din in 2012, whereas 'Heremakono' (2002) is an earlier and less widely-known meditation on the itineraries of different inhabitants of small coastal town at the westernmost edge of the Sahara. Both films are themselves acts of place-making that reveal the plurilingual and heterogenous vitality of desert spaces. In particular, Timbuktu sounds out a recessed translingual sonic, poetic, and musical archive that weaves together French, Bambara, Songhay, Tamashek, Arabic, and English, as well performances by Saharan artists including a score by Tunisian composer Amine Bouhafa and original compositions and performances by Toulou Kiki, a Tuareg singer from Niger who also stars in the film, and by the Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara. Sissako’s sounding-out of a threatened sonic archive invites us to cultivate different modes of listening and looking—and requires that we transform existing disciplinary boundaries by studying the Sahara as an interconnected center of aesthetic and cultural production rather than a silent or threatening margin.

In this paper I will look at the genealogies of constructing of the Zawaya identity in 19th century Mauritania. In the 19th century, the Saharan "religious" groups were seen by the French in Senegal as exclusively traders; while inside the Sahara they were largely perceived by the dominant Hassan groups, inter alia, as as settled people and subjects of taxations and hegemony. Their self-representation was largely ignored. Yet these zawaya perceived themselves as solely Islamic community, not defined by trade or by being underdogs. Indeed, they saw these classifications as distractions of an ulterior identity. This paper will try to navigate these conflicting representations through the genealogies of Zawaya. In additions to social histories (Ould Cheikh 1985; Bonte, 2016; Braham 2018) I will look at the works of Sidi ‘Abdullah Wuld al-Haj Ibrahim (d. 1818), Nabigha al-Gallawi (d. 1848), Cheikh Muhammad al-Mami (d. 1860),Cheikh Sa‘d Buh (d. 1917), and Baba Chiekh Sidiya (d. 1924). I will argue that a conglomerate of power and knowledge can explain the emergence of new religious identity as primary definition of the erstwhile Sanhaja tribes throughout Mauritania and western Sahara. By the 19th century, Zawaya, which indicated religious piety, spiritual authority, and “management of the unseen” (Ould Cheikh 1985) emerged as an ultimate social signifier that prescribed, ostracized, subsumed, and excised behaviors. This change in perception and self-definition involved also a gamut of existential techniques including politics of piety (Mahmoud 2015) and technologies of the selves (Foucault 1984). By self-defining, as well as being defined by dominant emirates, as a locus of disinterested and disarmed Islam, Zawaya, nonetheless, initiated a new moral and educational discours that contrasted identities in the Sahara. This discourse of identity was also significant in social critique, namely in conceptualizing and envisioning a Shari‘a system thought to be inchoate or distorted.