Desert Black: Arid Lands and Imperial Democracy in the Transatlantic World

Desert Black: Arid Lands and Imperial Democracy in the Transatlantic World is a book-length project that 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 book explores how knowledge about arid environments shaped the emergence of French and American imperial power. In the mid to late nineteenth century, the French state funded colonial expeditions across North and West Africa. These expeditions created new bodies of scientific knowledge about arid and semi-arid landscapes, while also ushering in the high point of French colonial control on the African continent. Under the banner of la mission civilisatrice, the French state positioned itself as both guardian and exporter of Western civilization and proclaimed itself a model of republican governance. Such processes were enabled by conscripted Black/African soldiers and laborers from across West Africa, who formed the bedrock of French colonial rule. At the same time in the United States, following the Civil War and the political and social upheaval brought about by the end of slavery, US soldiers and scientists pushed into what would become the “American” West, assembling networks of expert knowledge about these newly acquired arid lands. Recently emancipated Black laborers also moved westward, working with the US federal government to conduct arid land surveys and simultaneously attempting to carve out spaces of freedom in the West. In this project, I draw these 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.