Rock engravings in the Sahara attest to the longue durée of human activity and movement that have made up the desert’s past. Like the fossil record, the compendium of desert fauna in rock engravings speaks to the distant period of the Neolithic green Sahara, while scenes of hunting or dancing constitute important records of the human past. Still other engravings involve inscriptions in the Libyco-Berber and Arabic scripts, attesting to various civilizations that have flourished there and left a written record of their presence. But what of the contemporary archive of the Sahara that records or erases the recent past and present? Based on data from my own fieldwork and from the mediascape of the Sahara, this paper offers a reading of the Sahara’s linguistic landscapes as an archive of the contemporary. Linguistic landscape as it has currently been configured within the discipline of sociolinguistics is the study of writing in public space. As a counterpoint to the manuscripts that have long circulated within the Sahara, many of which have been archived in places like the Ahmed Baba library in Timbuktu, the writing that appears in public space is not erudite writing. It is a record of everyday activity, authored by people who are differently literate and who use their literacy resources to convey messages, to advertise, and to delineate or reclaim territory. Following a more general trend within the study of linguistic landscapes that construes landscape principally as cityscape, this paper focuses on the cities of the Sahara. Cities, as discursive centers, are characterized by denser, more complex linguistic landscapes than rural areas. They are privileged discursive sites associated with multiple forms of power, including symbolic power and the construction of multiple reading publics. This focus on the cities of the Sahara, at its most banal, draws attention to the fact that the desert is in fact home to a great number of cities. Beyond that, it attests to the multiple kinds of activities that go on in the urban Sahara, from tourism to migration to civil unrest and war. These linguistic landscapes are written in multiple scripts (Arabic, Tifinagh, Roman), each of which can be associated with a number of ideological stances. They are also written in multiple languages, mirroring the multilingual environments of these cosmopolitan cities. Taken together, this paper argues, they constitute a rich and complex archive of contemporary life in the cities of the Sahara.

On February 13, 1960, in the midst of the Algerian Revolution, or the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), the French colonial regime detonated its first over ground atomic bomb at Reggane military base, in the Algerian Sahara. Codenamed “Gerboise Bleue” (Blue Jerboa), it had a blast capacity of 70 kilotons, about 4 times the strength of LittleBoy, the United States’ atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima a month before the end of the Second World War. Blue Jerboa was followed by other atmospheric detonations, as well as various underground nuclear tests, which continued until 1966, four years after Algeria’s formal independence from France. With these toxic imprints, France became the fourth country to possess weapons for mass destruction after the United States of America, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the United Kingdom. However, France's nuclear program in the Sahara spread radioactive fallout across Algeria, North, Central and West Africa, and the Mediterranean (including southern Europe), causing irreversible contaminations among humans, natural and built environments. This paper discusses the toxicity of the norms and forms of France’s nuclear program in the Sahara. Its aim is twofold: first, to expose the spatial dimensions of this toxicity, whose archives are classified; and second, to interrogate the voices and artifacts that enable or disable the existence or perceptibility of these toxic environments.

Through close analysis of two multimodal media works (cartographic, cinematic, photographic, and sculptural) that chart the enduring afterlife of French nuclear imperialism within Saharan landscapes and lives, this paper investigates the critical possibilities of aesthetic representation for apprehending and addressing the toxicity of “slow violence” that targets desert ecosystems for destruction. France’s first seventeen nuclear bombs (1960-1966) scarred the Algerian Sahara with a radiological legacy whose impact has not been measured, surveyed, or fully studied, let alone redressed. Maps and archives are political fictions that have reflected and facilitated destructive power that has rendered seventeen nuclear bombs in the Sahara both justifiable and forgettable. In this situation, I make a case for centering aesthetic works as "anarchival" alternatives to legal frameworks for responding to the ongoing threat of nuclear harm. Elisabeth Leuvrey’s documentary film AT(h)OME (Les Éditions du large, 2013) combines landscape and portrait photographs by Bruno Hadjih with archival and contemporary audio and visual recordings that explore the obscured afterlife of the French nuclear bomb called “Béryl.” On May 2, 1962, this bomb escaped its subterranean detonation chamber inside the mountain Taourirt Tan-Afella to devastate the lives of those in a nearby village called Mertoutek, and it is often singled out as the worst “accident” in French nuclear history. The title of Ammar Bouras’s multimedia installation 24°3’55”N 5°3’23”E (Espaco Gallery Algiers, 2017) connects it directly to AT(h)OME, as this geolocation coordinate specifies the latitude and longitude of Béryl’s detonation point inside the granite mountain Taourirt Tan-Afella. Neither AT(h)OME nor 24°3’55”N 5°3’23”E take up the French-Algerian archival dispute. Ambivalent toward locked archives and state-sponsored legal redress, these works turn our attention to more radical anarchival possibilities inscribed in the radiant materiality of the desert itself.  

Since its mid-20th century inception, Mauritanian urban development has been inextricably related to its Saharan location. This paper highlights three aspects of the relationship between the Sahara Desert, the urban development process in Mauritania, and social relations and structures in the country. The first is the political compromise represented by the desert environment in which the urban development process in Mauritania was initiated. To the architects of Mauritanian independence, Nouakchott’s location could be presented as neutral in the face of competing northern and southern secessionist claims. This is the political compromise underlying what remains today the Sahara’s only capital city. The second aspect concerns the role of this desert environment in reproducing the social relations and structures that have accompanied postcolonial state development in the country. This is illustrated through a discussion of labour exploitation experienced by racialised migrant workers on remote desert construction sites that are far removed of Mauritania’s urban centres. Lastly, the paper discusses how these migrant workers, often located on the bottom rungs of the Mauritanian social hierarchy, make innovative use of this desert environment to navigate and make sense of their circumstances. Collectively, these three parts of the Mauritania/Sahara relationship point to how the desert can be viewed as an archive of social relations and urban development.

In this paper, I compare poems by the Tohono O’odham scholar and poet, Ofelia Zepeda, and Arizona-based authors Susan Briante and Joy Williams. I argue that each author lyrically and linguistically elaborates forms of sovereignty based on their respective geographical imagination, and that these political and ethical differences are artifacts of each author’s relationship to the desert. While each author works against the idea of the contemporary nation state as constituted by borders and state violence, I argue that a closer look at their texts shows fundamental differences regarding ideas of relation, belonging, desert ecology, and sovereignty, all of which hinge on their understanding of the Sonoran Desert as either full and creative, or empty and destructive. For Briante and Williams, the desert is a violent space whose parameters are determined by the twinned ideologies of empire and patriarchy. Their critiques push against these ideologies, but do not question—and indeed end up reifying—the concept of the desert as a fundamentally empty, inhospitable space. On the other hand, for Zepeda, being part of the Tohono O’odham people, although their lands are sundered by the U.S.-Mexico border, means continuing to insist upon and lyrically express the importance of the freedom of movement (such as journeying from the desert to the ocean) in conjunction with describing and inhabiting traditional lands. Working through her lyrics of creation and inhabitation, I show how rather than an empty desert devoid of life, Zepeda’s poetry of the Sonoran Desert—her O’odham—is full of stories that live, breathe, walk, and speak through acts of creation and inhabitation. In undertaking this comparative work, I hope to contribute to the emergent methods of Comparative Desert Studies, thinking in coalition with theorists of the Maghreb, decoloniality, diaspora, and migration. Although it is important to understand how the desert has functioned as a colonial space—specifically within the U.S., Mexican, and Western European imaginaries—it is time to turn to indigenous writers from and of the desert. This in turn helps us see deserts and their cultural ecologies as capacious, creative spaces.