Environmental imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa
By: edited by Diana K. Davis and Edmund Burke III ; with an afterword by Timothy Mitchell
Series: Ohio University Press series in ecology and history; Ohio University Press series in ecology and history
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Athens
Language: eng
Number of pages: 286
ISBN-13: 9780821419748
Subjects: Historiography; French Foreign public opinion; Environmental conditions; British Foreign public opinion; Human ecology; Colonies; History
Description: The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries, increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to critically examine culturally constructed views of the environmental history of the Middle East and suggest that they have often benefitted elites at the expense of the ecologies and the peoples of the region. The contributors expose many of the questionable policies and practices born of these environmental imaginaries and related histories that have been utilized in the region since the colonial period. They further reveal how power, in the form of development programs, notions of nationalism, and hydrological maps, for instance, relates to environmental knowledge production.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Imperialism, Orientalism, and the Environment in the Middle East : History, Policy, Power, and Practice / Diana K. Davis; title: "A Rebellion of Technology" : Development, Policing, and the British Arabian Imaginary / Priya Satia; title: Restoring Roman Nature : French Identity and North African Environmental History / Diana K. Davis; title: Body of Work : Water and Reimagining the Sahara in the Era of Decolonization / George R. Trumbull IV; title: From the Bottom Up : The Nile, Silt, and Humans in Ottoman Egypt / Alan Mikhail; title: Drafting a Map of Colonial Egypt : The 1902 Aswan Dam, Historical Imagination, and the Production of Agricultural Geography / Jennifer L. Derr; title: Remapping the Nation, Critiquing the State : Environmental Narratives and Desert Land Reclamation in Egypt / Jeannie Sowers; title: Salts, Soils, and (Un)Sustainabilities? Analyzing Narratives of Environmental Change in Southeastern Turkey / Leila M. Harris; title: Hydro-Imaginaries and the Construction of the Political Geography of the Jordan River : The Johnston Mission, 1953/56 / Samer Alatout; title: Environmentalism Deferred : Nationalisms and Israeli/Palestinian Imaginaries / Shaul Cohen.