Imagining deserts in the Americas: The "wasteland" as a racial signifier, "social construction" of Indigenous absence, and the "pseudo-Orientalist" idealization of "the romance of the desert"
A little collection to contemplate together.
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The social construction of the high, arid landscapes of the Southwest as “more or less worthless” has been a fundamental component of colonization of the Diné, as well as other southwestern and Great Basin tribes. In fact, the inhabitation of dry, arid landscapes by Native nations was used as evidence of their low status on the Western hierarchy of civilization […]. The “wasteland” is a racial and a spatial signifier that renders an environment and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable. […] [W]hile we find radioactive tailings piles in the desert, we also find leaking barrels of Agent Orange on Bahamian beaches, dioxin-releasing copper mines near the shores of the Great Lakes, and strip mines in the rainforests of South America. […] [T]herefore, […] colonial epistemologies do not just look on deserts as wastelands but that wastelands of many kinds are constituted through racial and spatial politics that render certain bodies and landscapes pollutable. […] This very pollution results in the common designation of wastelanded spaces, including those of the uranium industry on Diné land, as “sacrifice” zones. […] Wastelanding reifies - it makes real, material, lived - what might otherwise be only discursive. […] Race and space are connected through a social construction of difference that becomes spatialized through segregation and unequal distribution of resources. […] Wastelanding is a primary of of these “feat[s] of ontological magic,” wherein racialized lands are made to seem uninhabited or unimportantly inhabtied, represented as worthless, and then […] systematically stripped of their material and ideological worth. […] It means to wasteland, to render pollutable, the lungs, the cells, and the respiratory tracts of everyone involved in the nuclear cycle. It also means to wasteland Navajo worldviews, epistemology, history […].
Text above by: Traci Brynne Voyles. “Sacrifical Land.” Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. 2015. [Bold emphasis added by me.]
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Caren Kaplan (1996, 66) argues that “mystified versions of the ‘romance of the desert’ remain with us in postmodernity, often in the supposed service of a ‘postcolonial’ critical practice. The desire to become like or merge with the periphery or margin that one’s own power has established demonstrates the pitfalls of theoretical ‘tourism.’” Those who read the desert as a blank slate for imaginative experimentation and liberation from the status quo can slide dangerously close to, and sometimes merge with, the agents of mastery and exploitation. Indeed, […] the very idea that the desert offers such freedom is embedded in the notions of emptiness that serve to legitimize colonization and exploitation in the first place. […] For a nation concerned with agricultural expansion as the primary civilizing force, hitting arid lands meant that “the project of mastering the continent seemed to have reached a non-negotiable limit.” […] Nevertheless, even as the idea of the desert as ordeal […], the hardship the arid lands imposed on those who ventured into them served to confirm other aspects of Protestant America’s [disk horse] of spiritual mission […]. The well-off, educated middle classes made the deserts inviting as a purgative space of romantic sublimity and aesthetic purity. […] [A]esthetes like Rutgers art historian John C. Van Dyke were writing about the visual splendor of a land that should remain untouched by base economic interests. […] The conflict between contesting impulses toward either exploitation [”conservative”] or conservation [”progressive”] of the land is, then, present from the beginning of U.S. interest in its desert dominion, yet both positions derive at least part of their authority from the imposition of ideas of vacancy onto the terrain. Both read the space as empty and see this emptiness as its source of value, whether it be to extract from, build upon, or contemplate as evidence of some cosmic truth. Yet this notional vacancy functions also as a form of selective blindness that eliminates consideration of native inhabitants, indigenous traditions, and other, alternative spiritual and utilitarian values that may have prior claim to the land. Speculators and aesthetes alike need the tropes of emptiness and uselessness in order to validate their construction of the landscape as available space. Do the Pueblo Indians, for example, see the terrain they have inhabited for thousands of years as a gap, a vacancy, a howling wilderness?
Text by: John Beck. “Without Form and Void: The American Desert as Trope and Terrain.” Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2001, pages 63-83. [Bold emphasis added by me.]
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The unfamiliar desert ecology and climate meant that they could not easily deploy their trusted models of farming, animal husbandry, and commerce […]. To address this challenge, empire-builders in early America took Middle Eastern deserts as a key source of inspiration. Jefferson Davis’ Camel Corps [funded by a 1855 Congressional appropriation to collect camels from around the Middle East and Northern Africa] was one of the earliest examples of how this worked. […] American travel writers, explorers, scientists, and government officials had long described the arid West as a local version of the Middle Eastern and North African desert – an “American Zahara” or a Biblical Orient with spiritual and physical power […], “[…] recasting it as a quasi-Oriental space containing yet unidentified but extremely valuable historical and cultural riches” […] [,] a “domestic” Orient […]. [T]he U.S. Army waged overt war [with Indigenous residents] into the early 1900s. Displacing the people from the land was one thing, but redefining their social and cultural association with the desert was a different matter. […] This is vividly illustrated when the U.S. Army finally collected enough camels in Texas to run its first Camel Corps trial to assess the animals’ endurance and suitability for military purposes. The Army’s man in charge, General [E.F.B.], brought Hi Jolly, his fellow cameleers, and a large camel caravan together to travel from Texas to California […]. When the expedition stopped in Los Angeles in January 1858, the San Francisco Evening Bulletin described the scene with dramatized gusto: General Beale and about fourteen camels stalked into town last Friday week and gave our streets quite an Oriental aspect. It looked oddly enough to see outside of a menagerie, a herd of huge, ungainly awkward but docile animals […] bringing up weird and far-off associations to the Eastern traveler, whether by book or otherwise of the land of the mosque, crescent or turban, of the pilgrim mufti and dervish with visions of the great shrines of the world, Mecca […], and the toiling throngs that have for centuries wended thither, of the burning sands of Arabia and Sahara where the desert is boundless as the ocean and the camel is the ship thereof. This account actively rewrites the then-dominant imaginary of U.S. West […], enlisting the camel to transform it into a whimsical vision of the Old World in the New. […] Colonization was made friendlier by conceiving of it as a pilgrimage, an act of return.
Text by: Natalie Koch. “Double Exposure.” Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia. 2022. [Bold emphasis added by me.]
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Entitled “Deserts Will Bloom Through Atomic Power,” this 1947 ad pictures a terraformed desert valley with a farm that runs on atomic power. […] The ad copy explains, “New ‘BREAD BASKETS’ of the world can grow where only sand and scrub had been. Harnessed atomic energy will transform deserts into rich fruit and grain country.” […] While these wasteland-to-farmland hopes appear in different circumstances with varying intents, […] they are instances of the Edenic recovery narrative that historian Carolyn Merchant identified in Western environmental discourse. […] [T]he promise of a renewed Edenic paradise has historically masked programs of conquest, exploitation, and destruction. Visions such as those from Seagram’s and General Electric offer idyllic, bucolic landscapes, but as with other pastoral art and writing, much is obscured. They mask possible or actual legacies of land seizure and other dispossessions, contamination, and pollution. Of course, there is also the fundamental assumption that these lands are no more than “waste” and only valuable when cultivated in designated ways. […] In his 1909 collected lectures, […] British chemist [F.S.] predicted that […] humans “could transform a desert continent … and make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden.”
Text by: Chirs Fite. “Imagining a New Eden in the Nuclear West.” Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia (Spring 2020), no. 9, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.
