Desert Distortion

This book intersects environmental humanities, critical theory, and literary criticism with the Desert Southwest. It explores the fullness of desert places with regard to cultures, borders, and languages as well as nonhuman forces and elements like heat, distance, and light. Dispelling the dominant notion of desert as void, it sets a stage to suit the polyvocality and abundance of desert places. In working against static representations of the Desert Southwest that have persisted throughout popular culture, the book employs the term “desert distortion” as a productive way to use the desert’s agency in texts to unsettle old understandings and allow for experiencing the dynamic desert anew. Hence the title’s use of the word revealing: it is an argument that the desert is and has always been abundant. The book’s main aim is to read abundance in literature from and about the Southwest, applying desert distortion to perform multiple, coexisting understandings of desert places, and consequently of place more broadly. Through expansiveness of vision and curiosity of exploration, the desert then becomes a place of interconnection, proliferation, and imagination.