Amina Zarzi (University of Oxford) | The Sahara Desert: A Crossroads of Colonial Encounters and Re-imagined Futures

For time eternal, the Sahara has informed the imaginary of Muslim travellers, local inhabitants and Europeans, showcasing the legendary desert's liberating potential but also denouncing the constraints inside the walls of the ksour. It is in light of these paradoxical representations that this paper proposes to discuss the ways in which Algerian literature by Malika Mokeddem and Yasmina Khadra (both born in the Algerian desert) negotiates the complex dynamics of the desert against the backdrop of cross-cultural encounters in a way that both resists and celebrates the presence of European travellers and writers such as Isabelle Eberhardt and Charles de Foucauld. As a result, the Sahara acts as a locus where born nomads like Mokeddem and Khadra re-imagine their cultural identities in multicultural societies, remembering and reshaping colonial figures in postcolonial times.