Title:
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Encountering the Sahara : French literary geographies and visual representations of the nineteenth-century desert
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Following Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, the deserts of North Africa -
and the Sahara in particular -' became a major landscape of the nineteenth-century
French geographical imagination. Central to imperial conquest and colonial
expansion, the Sahara inspired military missions, travel expeditions, and
encyclopaedic surveys, as well as literature and paintings. Drawing on literary and
visual theory, human geography, cultural history, and philosophy, my thesis
explores representations of the Saharan desert in a selection of nineteenth-century
French texts and images. My corpus ranges from the Description de l'Egypte
(1809-29) to Eugene Daumas' military journal, Le Sahara algerien (1845), and
from Maxime Du Camp's travel writing and photographs to Eugene Fromentin's
Algerian narratives (ca. 1857-59) and Isabelle Eberhardt's autobiographical
writings (ca. 1899-1904). In bringing together this hybrid corpus, I examine
different cultural formations and discursive conceptions of landscape: landscape as
an empirical field of research and landscape as a projection of cultural ideas and
ideologies. I explore several interrelated questions. How might attention to the
poetics of French colonial literature open up fresh readings of the cultural
constructions of North African landscapes in the nineteenth century? What
happens to the notion of 'imagined geographies' when material experiences of
embodied proximity with other landscapes and peoples are carefully analyzed?
And, how might these reflections provide new and alternative ways of
understanding and interpreting 'encounters' with North African landscapes outside
of traditional critical narratives of domination and colonialism? This attention to
landscape complicates straightforward interpretations of the Sahara as a 'backdrop'
or 'setting' for colonial exploration. Instead, the environmental specificity of the
desert is . shown to trouble and subvert the ambitions of totalizing European
projects, exposing the limitations of Orientalism and its binary structures (East and West, Self and Other, proximity and distance), which occlude, more than they
explain, the complexity of France's multiple encounters with the Sahara.
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