Tracing the Desert Island: Atlantis, Unknowability, and Colonial Imagination

This contribution studies the myth of the desert-ocean in Pierre Benoit’s 1919 [1920] hit novel L’Atlantide. Locating the mythical lost continent in the Sahara, the novel catered to the period’s exoticism while serving colonial ideology. While the desert was materially crucial for the Empire, it also provided new symbolic ground, becoming a favored locus of the colonial imagination as a site of extreme hostility, due as much to its climate as to its anticolonial activity. As the ultimate colonial fantasy, the desert also paradoxically provided fertile ground for a contrapuntal utopian discourse, apparent when reading Benoit’s novel in light of contemporary narratives, where it appears as a warrior hideout and a refuge for rebels, both real and fictional. Building on Paul Ricœur’s notion of the “trace,” I read the desert as a site of epistemological resistance. The imperialist compulsion to know, which lead to the thorough exploration and mapping of the land, coexists with an impulse towards unknowability, rooted in exotic fantasies and romantic projections. As the last reservoir of adventure and discovery in a globalized world of control and epistemological exhaustivity, the desert becomes a symbolic and literal “point de fuite,” a terra incognita where (anti)colonial narratives can take shape.