What is the relationship between imagined and embodied knowledge of geographical space?
In July of 2024, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Jill Jarvis over Zoom about her work in progress, Signs in the Desert: An Aesthetic Cartography of the Sahara. Jarvis defines the book project as an act of “aesthetic cartography” in which she argues that aesthetic works such as literature, art, and film fill in the knowledge gaps left behind by state-sponsored maps and colonial histories.
The conversation explores the Sahara as a conceptual space mapped through aesthetics in literature, art, and film in opposition to a historically objective space defined by political relationships of power. Both hailing from the arid climate of Idaho and pursuing research in French, Arabic, and African Studies, Dr. Jarvis and I traced our shared imaginaries of the Sahara from such diverse works as the 1946 children’s book Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry to Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s 2014 film Timbuktu.
