Sahara: A Thousand Paths Into the Future

The Sahara emerges as a space of utmost intensity of being, sharing, resistance, and reimagining the futures. In their thinking and writing, African philosophers, writers, and artists repeatedly invoke the image and the notion of the Sahara as a contested realm of colonial and decolonial epistemologies. Even after decades of symbolic struggles, imagining Sahara as a rich living world, home to indigenous peoples and oasis cities, various non-human entities and ancestral legacies, multilayered African histories and yet-to-be-reclaimed memories is somehow still a challenge.

The anthology Sahara: A Thousand Paths Into the Future is a network of multiple crossings and forking, intertwining pathways and circadian rhythms carrying peoples, stories, voices, and knowledges. In this collection of essays, poems, stories, and visual discourses, the Sahara can be seen as a space for decolonizing knowledge on the divisions of Africa; revisiting the idea of the borders, their legitimacy, and reality; looking for the colonial and postcolonial sociopolitical reasons for violence, terrorism, arms trade, and involuntary migration; rethinking migration as freedom of movement, travel, trading, sharing, being, and imagining; listening to African feminisms; opening up to stories and experiences of Saharan indigenous peoples; empowering climate justice and talking about the effect of climate change on peoples and environments in and around the desert; imagining plural futures for the continent and the world; and more…

With contributions by Badi, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Binta Diaw, Rahima Gambo, Monique Ilboudo, Beaouda Lebdai, Achille Mbembe, Yara Mekawei, Amy Niang, Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Hindatou Oumarou Ibrahim, Felwine Sarr, Jonas Staal, and others.

Co-edited by Kateryna Botanova, Yarri Kamara, and Quinn Latimer
Co-published by Sternberg Press
Designed by Gaile Pranckunaite