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Abstract
Deserts are often imagined as empty and therefore as spaces to be colonized. Through the analysis of Gustave Guillaumet’s painting Le désert, Deleuze & Guattari’s treatise on nomadology and the novel La mise en scène by Claude Ollier, I show how emptiness is a feature of deserts only when they are perceived from the outside. This outside focalization engenders a particular politics of place that I want to critique. I do this through the reading of L’invention du désert by Tahar Djaout and an artwork by Raymond Depardon and Titouan Lamazou. Both foreground the desert as a place covered with palimpsestic traces of human histories and with flexible demarcations of lived spaces.
Abstract
Deserts are often imagined as empty and therefore as spaces to be colonized. Through the analysis of Gustave Guillaumet’s painting Le désert, Deleuze & Guattari’s treatise on nomadology and the novel La mise en scène by Claude Ollier, I show how emptiness is a feature of deserts only when they are perceived from the outside. This outside focalization engenders a particular politics of place that I want to critique. I do this through the reading of L’invention du désert by Tahar Djaout and an artwork by Raymond Depardon and Titouan Lamazou. Both foreground the desert as a place covered with palimpsestic traces of human histories and with flexible demarcations of lived spaces.