Alif 33 : The Desert: Human Geography and Symbolic Economy

This interdisciplinary issue is devoted to the desert-as a geographical locus and symbolic image-and to various texts related to it, drawn from Literature and the Arts, History and Anthropology, Film and Environmental Studies. Scholars from the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North America contribute articles in Arabic, English, and French related to the visual representation of the desert in medieval iconography and in contemporary cinema, in American poetry and in pre-Islamic poetics, in human geography and in sociological thought, in French novels and in Arabic novels, in religious traditions and in ecological approaches, in travel literature and in critical discourse.