Storied Deserts: Reimagining Global Arid Lands

Storied Deserts makes a crucial and critical intervention in the field of environmental humanities by showcasing an emerging body of research on desert places from around the world.

Deserts, despite dominant stereotypes of wasteland and barrenness, are culturally and ecologically abundant places. This edited volume sets out to reimagine the world’s desert places and the very concept of ＂the desert＂ itself, taking a boldly interdisciplinary and multicultural approach. Authors engage in literary ecocriticism and ecopoetics, film and visual studies, critical theory, personal and transdisciplinary reflection, creative practices, and historical scholarship. Through their diverse range of perspectives, contributors show how arid lands have been and can be understood as sites of narrative production, places where signs and imaginaries are born from the materialities of space and entanglement. In this way, this volume highlights how the storied matter of the Earth’s deserts informs lived realities, environmental histories, cinematic and literary imaginaries, political conflicts, and even intellectual categories such as ＂the human＂ and ＂the elemental＂.

Ultimately, this book shows that reimagining desert places can help us to grapple with the epochal challenges of the Anthropocene. It is an important and engaging collection for scholars and students across disciplines that helps establish the value of desert humanities.

Celina Osuna is a scholar and an artist. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, and her research, with an emphasis on Indigenous and Latinx Environmentalisms, explores aesthetics of desert places in literature, art, and film and their impacts on cultural imagination and geopolitical relationships to land. Her monograph, Desert Distortion, is forthcoming.

Aidan Tynan is Senior Lecturer in English literature at Cardiff University. He is the author of two monographs, Deleuze’s Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms (2012) and The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics (2020). He has published two edited volumes, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature (2015) and Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money (2017).