HIST 312 - Global Desert Histories

This course will draw on recent and emerging scholarship in desert studies to consider how deserts have been (mis)represented, controlled, and administered across the world, from the Sahara and Arabian Deserts, to the Mojave and the Sonora, to the Gobi and the Kalahari, utilizing transnational and comparative frameworks. Deserts are typically portrayed as “lifeless” spaces - devoid of inhabitants, savage and uncivilized, extractable and exploitable, and, often, as a “problem” to be solved. Recent work across disciplines has challenged this portrayal, demonstrating the diverse ecosystems, varied topography, and rich indigenous cultures that inhabit deserts across the globe. In this course, we will take up these conflicting accounts: the first half of the course will explore the complex and often violent histories of colonization and control in deserts, from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, throughout which both colonial and state actors have used them as spaces of resource extraction, colonial expansion, weapons experimentation, and carceral punishment. The second half of the course will engage with scholarship that reconsiders traditional definitions of “deserts,” takes seriously the life forms, human and nonhuman, that inhabit them, and investigates the potential for a desert-centric approach to history. We will consider the ways different local populations have subsisted within and cultivated sustainable relationships with desert landscapes, the successes and failures of global institutional bodies’ efforts to address desertification, and future directions for policy and scholarship in the age of climate change.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): HUM 110 or sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Lecture-conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.