Storied Deserts

Celina Osuna is a scholar and an artist. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, and her research, with an emphasis on Indigenous and Latinx Environmentalisms, explores aesthetics of desert places in literature, art, and film and their impacts on cultural imagination and geopolitical relationships to land. Her monograph, Desert Distortion, is forthcoming with Texas Tech University Press. Aidan Tynan is Senior Lecturer in English literature at Cardiff University. He is the author of two monographs, Deleuze’s Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms (2012) and The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics (2020). He has published two edited volumes, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature (2015) and Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money (2017).

Introduction Part One: Elemental Narratives 1. A Duel in the Sand: On Cinematic Spectacle in Arid Lands 2. The Dark, Dead Corners of the Earth: The Imaginary of the Antarctic as “Deserta” 3. Deserts of Doom, Spaces of Potential: Representations of the Desert in the Australian Imagination 4. “Blinded by the Light”: Exploring the Desert as Luminous Landscape Part Two: Poetics of Aridity 5. Revisiting Palai: Imaginings of Arid Lands in Tamil Literary and Cultural Texts 6. Yawp from Atop the Desert Sand: The Poetics of Existentialism in Jāhiliya Poetry and Beyond 7. Exploring “y Paith”: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Desert Environments in Patagonia, Argentina 8. Parched Poetics: Disarticulations from a Desert Part Three: Land: Politics of Belonging 9. Combatting Desertification and Narrating Environmental Crisis in the United Nations 10.The Atacama Desert: Environmental Imagery from Presumably Void Geographies Between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean Cliffs 11. From Handback to Landback: Lessons from Uluru 12. Borderlands Ecologies: Informed Imaginaries in Signs Preceding the End of the World and Encantado 13. “Palmas Ultimas,” “Desert Surroundings,” and “Sonora, Mexico”