This spring, the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies hosted a three-part lecture series, “The Deserts of the Middle East and North Africa.” Conceptualized in collaboration with Lamia Balafrej, professor of art history and a UCLA faculty affiliate of CNES, the series focused on innovative approaches to studying desert spaces in the region. The individual lectures were delivered as part of a spring quarter 2025 seminar (ART HIS 220B) taught by Balafrej, but open to the general public.
The series highlighted interdisciplinary and transhistorical explorations of the desert as both an ecosystem and a discourse, a landscape and a trope. Arid regions constitute no less than 80 percent of the MENA region and are home to indigenous populations.
“These environments are imagined as barren, desolate terrains, if not as obstacles to culture and civilization. Yet, they have played and continue to play a major role in facilitating the mobility of objects, people and ideas,” said Balafrej.
The three lectures challenged the prevailing conception of a desert as an empty, useless space, while at the same time demonstrating its significance not only to indigenous peoples native to these lands, but also to colonial ambitions and projects — whether in the first half of the 20th century or during the Middle Ages.
The first lecture in the series was delivered by Danika Cooper (UC Berkeley, department of landscape architecture & environmental planning). Entitled ‘Surrounded by Sea, Haunted by Dust,’ Cooper’s lecture discussed how the trope of the desert as an empty space influences how we read the Sahara Desert.
She demonstrated the prevalence of Western conceptions of the desert as empty by tracing it through the etymology of the word itself in Latin, French and English, as well as through the examination of how dry lands have been described in European geographies and land classifications.
More broadly, Cooper touched upon the presence of this trope in art, such as Thomas Cole’s painting, ‘Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.’ Arguing that ideas about how we conceptualize an environment have to do with how we treat people who inhabit those lands, the scholar then extended her discussion to colonial readings of the Sahara that claimed desertification was not natural or endemic, but man-made: the product of the actions of native people who inhabited these lands.
Danika Cooper. Photo by CNES.
According to Cooper, the desert was seen as a space to be altered and used for the benefit of white colonizers. As such, colonial powers in North Africa in the first half of the 20th century propagated strategies to control the desert environment and advance their colonial aspirations through de-desertification and forestation. After World War II, colonial understandings and policies related to arid lands were transferred to the United Nations and intergovernmental agencies. For example, UNESCO created an arid zone research program to stop the advancement of deserts in 1951.
Cooper concluded by highlighting the importance of dry spaces for the planet's future, as well as the mutually reliant and entangled relationship between deserts and forests.
African gold and sub-Saharan delivery routes
The second lecture in the “Deserts of the Middle East and North Africa” series was delivered by Sarah Guérin (University of Pennsylvania, history of art department). “In Auro de Paleola: Aureate Ambitions and the Eighth Crusade” focused on the events that led to the Eighth Crusade, , with an emphasis on situating these events in Africa.
Specifically, Guérin argued that the Louis IX’s second crusade and last crusade of 1270 was supposedly diverted because the king had learned that Tunis was the outlet for West African gold coming across the Sahara. King Louis IX had two interrelated goals in 1266: to initiate the minting of the solid gold coin and to return to the region on crusade. Amidst the endemic gold shortages in continental Europe at this time, the king was aware that Genoa and Tuscany had commerce relations with the Hafsid empire, which supplied them with gold (referred to as auro de palolus), but had no direct access to it.
Although Louis IX believed that this gold came from Tunisia, and thus directed his crusade there, there were (and are) no gold sources in Tunisia. Instead, Guérin noted that the Hafsids obtained gold in Paleola, a term that began to appear in Latin, French and Italian documents in the 12th century. However, Paleola’s exact location had been unknown. The scholar explained that that it is located somewhere near Libya, south of the Sahara Desert, and is referred to as “the island of gold” in Arabic sources.
Sarah Guérin. Photo by CNES.
Gold from Paleola was carried to Tunisia through sub-Saharan trade networks of that time, making its way to Louis IX and prompting the Eighth Crusade, explained the art historian. In conclusion, Guérin argued that the desire to move into other regions was just as present in Europe in the 13th century as it was in the 15th century, when we see official colonial aspirations materialize. If crusaders are understood as proto-colonial, then auro de Paleola coins are evidence that pre-colonial expansionist policies, economic ambitions and the spread of Christianity were intertwined.
Art that responds to colonial-era mapmaking
The final lecture in the series was delivered by Jill Jarvis (Yale University, department of French) and was focused on analyzing a recent sculpture installation by Lydia Ourahmane called Tassili (2022), which recreates a mid-20th century archaeological expedition to prehistoric rock art sites at Tassili n’Ajjer in Algeria. The work offers both an insight into the allure of the lands of the Sahara Desert and an orchestrated longing for the largely inaccessible landscape of Tassili n’Ajjer.
The installation attempts to “release” the rock art sites of Tassili from its embeddedness in the natural landscape and social, historical and memorial meaning-making processes, said Jarivs. When Ourahmane and her team embarked on what the art historian called “aesthetic cartography” of the site, they reflected on the mapmaking and land surveying that were fundamental to French colonial occupation of Algeria and areas of the Sahara Desert in the early 19th century.
Jill Jarvis. Photo by CNES.
The team consciously retraced the steps of the 1956 archeological exhibition into the area, which was sponsored by French colonial powers, but relied on the knowledge of local Tuareg guides. Jarvis connected Ourahmane’s Tassili with the 1956 archeological exhibition of the site and the ensuing 1957 French administrative project, Organisation Commune des Régions Sahariennes (OCRS) — which attempted to redraw the borders of French-occupied Sahara lands — in order to analyze, question and challenge aesthetic representations of desert spaces.
Tassili, said Jarvis, replicates not only the severance of indigenous peoples from the site by colonial powers, land seizures and the redrawing of borders of the 19th and 20th centuries, but also the colonial trope of the desert as an empty, uninhabited space.