
Sahara
A Thousand Paths Into the Future
Sternberg Press
Published on 1. September 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
288 pages
978-1-915609-20-5 (ISBN)
Description
An anthology that accompanies Culturescapes 2023 Sahara, the 17th edition of the Swiss multidisciplinary festival. Sahara: A Thousand Paths Into the Future is devoted to the ideas, images, poetics, politics, fictions, and movements of this vast desert and its myriad voices. Focused on the cultural productions, lines of political and aesthetic thought, and multiple epistemologies and cosmologies of the Sahara, and the accompanying Sahel, this book understands the region as both an ancient space of connection and circulation--from its northern to southern shores, its dunes and volcanic mountains, to its lusher savannahs--and as a contemporary site of exchange between strikingly singular societies and communities on all sides of the desert, that aspect of the Sahara most often imaged and imagined. If the Sahara is habitually narrated as a space of radical heat and intense light, and of barren-like emptiness, this anthology approaches the region with a decolonial lens that privileges the Saharan communities and nonhuman entities who live within all aspects of its circadian rhythms, including the constructive opacity of the desert night. The violence of enlightenment and its imperialisms have often been practiced under the glare of some narcotic sun--the imaginaries of coloniality still do--yet in the desert, it was the elaborating darkness of its night skies, with their spectral constellations, that often directed caravans on their historical routes. They still do. Thus the thinkers, artists, poets, choreographers, composers, activists, elders, novelists, historians, and translators whose voices and sensibilities score and structure this anthology create a more full-spectrum and polyphonic sense of what the Sahara means, in all its waves and forms. Sahara: A Thousand Paths Into the Future indicates a prismatic space of cultures, ecologies, knowledges, conflicts, languages, lights, and relations. That is, of numerous pasts and possible futures. Contributors
>Copublished with Culturescapes
>Copublished with Culturescapes
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
65 COLOR ILLUS.
Dimensions
Height: 259 mm
Width: 216 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
610 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-915609-20-5 (9781915609205)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Kateryna Botanova is a Basel-based cultural critic, curator, and writer. She co-curates a multidisciplinary biennial Culturescapes and co-edits its anthologies. She researches and writes on decoloniality and artistic practices in Eastern Europe and the Global South. Yarri Kamara is a writer, translator, and policy researcher. She has spent the bulk of her life in West and East African countries. She is a member of UNESCO's 2005 Convention Expert Facility that provides cultural policy support to developing countries. Quinn Latimer is a writer and editor. She was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, and she is the editor or co-editor of numerous critical anthologies and artist catalogues.