Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa

“This well-edited volume can be helpful both for scholars who would like to focus on particular geographic areas of the Middle East and North Africa, and for those interested in a wider view of this region’s history. By questioning dichotomies built by ‘orientalist’ and ‘postcolonial’ scholars alike, the articles gathered in this volume offer a fresh and unusual perception of the region and its history during the past two hundred years. Taking into account the fact that the environment is always a human one, these questions should be asked not only by environmental historians, but by sociologists, anthropologists, and—even more important—political activists in this region as well. It is essential for understanding what is going on there.”

“Environment at the Margins profitably engages the ecocritical idea that authoritative stories and suggestive stories work together as society-wide, discursive wholes.”

“(T)he collection contributes as much to research on orientalism, imperialism, and nationalism as to environmental studies. Nevertheless, it is the focus on the natural world that keeps the work grounded and takes it into new terrains, literally and metaphorically…. It should serve as a useful corrective to uncritical declensionist accounts of the region still found in world environmental histories.”

“These outstanding essays create new pathways for applying Edward Said‘s foundational thesis of Orientalism to nature and environment in the Middle East and North Africa over three centuries to the present. Summing Up: Highly recommended.”

“This volume goes far beyond the current work in ‘colonial studies’ which tends to discuss ‘imperial visions and imaginings’ without grappling with the much more important issue: how these colonial visions of other peoples and other landscapes were instrumentalized

on the ground in ways that drastically affected real people’s daily lives and livelihoods—and the nature of postcolonial states and societies.” ~Julia Clancy-Smith

“Perhaps in no other region of the globe has the environment been so central to its constitution and history than the Middle East. If nature has come to define the Arab-Islamic world, what are the historic forms and tropes through which this naturalization has been achieved and how has the environment become an object of knowledge? What are the imaginaries which shape our understandings of the region’s environment and why have they had such tenacity and durability? These questions are central to this excellent and path-breaking collection of provocative papers which address the complex cultural, political, scientific, and biophysical ways in which, for example, oil, the nomad, the desert, and so on are built into compelling and efficacious environmental narratives, policies, and practices. An exemplary political ecology of the MENA region.” ~Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley