Walter Bruyère-Ostells and Berny Sèbe (ed.), «Écrire le désert: aux sources de la «Saharomanie»», Outre-Mers journal of colonial and imperial history, n°428-429, 2025. (ISSN 1631-0438)

Presentation:

«Écrire le désert» goes back to the roots of Saharomania, analysing this infatuation with places that might otherwise have been seen as a deterrent rather than a magnet for the European imagination. This dossier examines and sheds light on the documents that gave rise to this phenomenon, which has become a historian's treasure trove. Evoking the double helix of DNA, the two conceptual meanings of ‘source« that we are concerned with here feed, in a closely intertwined impetus, two questions around which this special report has been structured: how can one »write the desert«? How does one write the history of the desert? These are questions that are at once literary and historical, cultural and geographical, and which the articles in this special issue seek to answer, thanks to the coalescence of French and English historians, archivists and literary scholars. Through this multidisciplinary prism, »writing the desert« reveals itself to be a remarkably varied, fertile and polysemous intercultural phenomenon, enriched by a space whose immensity is matched only by its diversity.