Environmental Studies 202-B: ST: Greening the Desert

From the Sahara to the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula, deserts have long held an important place for different cultural and national identities associated with North Africa and the Middle East. These environments loom large in visual and written representations of the region, along with waterways and oases as their essential counterparts. Different groups have harnessed the language of "greening the desert" as a key to modernity, creating lasting impacts on the environment in ways that dramatically change the way humans live in and around these spaces. The course will consider Orientalism, science, and technology as discourses and practices that have contributed to the way modernity has been imagined and produced, along with pre-modern Arab poetry that establishes the importance of the desert for cultural identity. Through readings in fiction and poetry from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, and Israel, our topics will include land reclamation and agricultural reform, the impacts of dams, and petrocapitalism. We will also discuss how desert discourses ripple into the realm of politics in cases such as imperial administration, water rights, Zionism, Palestinian land rights, urban infrastructure, and policy impacts on other marginalized communities that include Nubians and Bedouins. This course fulfills the Paradigms requirement for the Environmental Humanities major and the Environmental Humanities requirement for all Environmental Studies majors. May be taken for credit toward the South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies major. Distribution areas: Humanities, Global Cultures and Languages, Power and Equity, Textual Analysis.