Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia

Keywords: desert, Arizona, US Southwest, Middle East, arid lands, settler colonialism, environmental imaginary, political geography
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 39

Abstract

In colonizing the arid lands of southwestern North America, Anglo-American settlers struggled to make sense of the region’s human and physical geography. Yet explorers, scientists, travel writers, and political leaders quickly learned to interpret these deserts with reference to foreign but nonetheless familiar deserts – reading them as a local version of the Middle Eastern and North African desert. As an “American Zahara” or a Biblical Orient, these narratives evoked the spiritual and physical power equal to the Old World deserts that populated the Judeo-Christian imaginations of white settlers – those who Western boosters sought to entice to colonize the desert. Empire-builders in early America took Middle Eastern deserts as a key source of inspiration in more than just imagery, though. They actually imported to the Southwest animals (e.g. camels), plants (e.g. date palms), and ideas about governing people and nature alike. Focusing on this long history of ties between Arizona and the Arabian Peninsula, this paper outlines the key arguments of my forthcoming book, Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia (Verso, 2022). I show how desert-to-desert material flows as well as environmental imaginaries of the “desert” have been enlisted by many different actors who are, directly and indirectly, involved in the building of U.S. state power domestically and later, in the Middle East. The “desert,” I show, is constantly reinvented by these actors, as they learn to use it in new and unexpected ways. And this is the story of empire itself.