Desert Black: Arid Lands and Imperial Democracy in the Transatlantic World explores the transnational circulations of arid lands knowledge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing on the interrelations between the United States and France, the project explores how knowledge about arid environments shaped the emergence of French and American imperial power.

Meché brings historical developments together to show how contestations over democratic rule, imperial expansion, and Black/African labor shaped transatlantic processes of nation building in France and the United States. This interdisciplinary project draws from the fields of historical geography, political theory, the history of science, Black and Indigenous studies, and political ecology to offer a reconsideration of the relationship between nature, power, and society.