Dr Berny Sèbe reflects on trips to France and Chile, where he met with students, scholars and even the navy to explore the cultural history of desert spaces.
As one of the foundational experiences of the world we live in, colonialism is never far when one scratches the surface. This deeply complex, passionately contested and highly controversial phenomenon is at the heart of my research, which endeavours to explore it from a variety of complementary perspectives – disciplinary or spatio-temporal.
After stays in Germany (Albert Ludwigs Universität, Freiburg-im-Breisgau), France (Sorbonne) and the US (University of Texas at Austin), I’ve seized the opportunity to pursue new avenues in the last few months, consolidating my work on the cultural history of desert spaces, and expanding into new linguistic territories with a foray into South America, while at the same time sharing my research results with overseas audiences.
In April, I co-organised with Professor Walter Bruyère-Ostells an international conference entitled ‘Ecrire le désert : Enjeux, Sources, Analyses/Writing the Desert: Directions, Sources and Perspectives’ as part of a visiting professorship at the prestigious Institute of Political Studies of Aix-en-Provence. The conference was supported by a range of established French institutions, including the Centre for Overseas Archives, Panthéon-Sorbonne University and the French Society for Overseas History.
Presenters from the USA, the UK, France, Algeria, Argentina and the UN explored methodological issues related to conducting research about desert spaces – notably around key questions which had often remained neglected, and which crystallized into a series of field-defining queries, including:
The conference was a welcome opportunity to reflect upon the meaning and role of arid spaces in world history, at a time when climate change might make this type of climatic conditions more prevalent in the twenty-first century. It also consolidated my work on deserts, encapsulated in my forthcoming monograph Empire of Emptiness: Fortresses in the Colonial Conquest of the Sahara. This aspect was combined with an ambitious public engagement plan that included the presentation of an open-air street gallery on the premises of Sciences-Po Aix, introducing the unique history and ecosystem of the Sahara.
July saw the perspectives turned upside down, quite literally from a geographical standpoint, as I moved to the Southern hemisphere as a visiting professor at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez. A leading private institution in Chile, with campuses in Santiago and Viña del Mar, this university invited me to share my insights into questions of memory and colonialism, as part of its MA programme ‘History and Memory’. The discussions with staff and students were enriched by the fact that they tapped into the parallel – and sometimes intertwined, in more ways than is usually acknowledged – legacies of early Spanish imperialism and twentieth-century dictatorship.
As part of my stay, I co-organised with my local host, Dr Rodrigo Escribano Roca, a symposium exploring the role of Spain as a lesser imperial power in the late modern era, but one which still had global ambitions, as exemplified by its imperial designs in Morocco and the Western Sahara – about which I spoke. Under the title ‘Un Imperio Ambivalente. España y el imperialismo informal en el largo Siglo XIX/An Ambivalent Empire: Spain and informal imperialism in the long nineteenth-century’, the conference attracted scholars from Chile, the US, Spain, the UK, Switzerland, Italy, Mexico and the Philippines, who explored the various ways in which nineteenth-century Spanish imperialism departed from its early modern precedent, and sought to emulate strategies implemented by Britain and France.
During my stay, I was able to speak to the officers of the Chilean Marine Corps about my research into the military conquest of desert spaces, sharing my findings with a Hispanophone Navy, which had also been confronted in the past to desert conditions in the Atacama. Indeed, this visiting professorship also supported my ongoing work on the place of desert spaces, notably by allowing me to include the Atacama desert into my analytical framework.
These two stays at international institutions – with which Birmingham has partnerships – have allowed me to reach new audiences in languages other than English (I delivered my lectures in French and Spanish), to bring new historical, historiographical and visual material into focus, and they will also feed into the departmental module ‘Echoes of Colonialism Across Cultures’, which I teach in Modern Languages at the College of Arts and Law.
Senior Lecturer in colonial and post-colonial studies
Biographical and contact information for Dr Berny Sèbe, Lecturer in Colonial and Post-Colonial Studies at the University of Birmingham.
