In the face of accelerating climate change, anticapitalist environmental justice activists and elite tech corporations increasingly see eye-to-eye. Both envision solar-powered futures where renewable energy redresses gentrification, systemic racism, and underemployment. However, as Myles Lennon argues in Subjects of the Sun, solar power is no less likely to exploit marginalized communities than dirtier forms of energy. Drawing from ethnographic research on clean energy corporations and community solar campaigns in New York City, Lennon argues that both groups overlook solar’s extractive underside because they primarily experience energy from the sun in the virtual world of the cloud. He shows how the material properties of solar technology—its shiny surfaces, decentralized spatiality, and modularity—work closely with images, digital platforms, and quantitative graphics to shape utopic visions in which renewable energy can eradicate the constitutive tensions of racial capitalism. As a corrective to this virtual world, Lennon calls for an equitable energy transition that centers the senses and sensibilities neglected by screenwork: one’s haptic care for their local environment; the full-bodied feel of infrastructural labor; and the sublime affect of the sun.

Myles Lennon is Dean’s Assistant Professor of Environment and Society and Anthropology at Brown University.

“Myles Lennon demonstrates the importance of reading solar energy not as a neutral resource to be freely exploited but instead as a classed, raced, gendered, and historical product that fundamentally and importantly has the possibility to be otherwise. Showing how disembodied data and techno-utopian approaches to solar energy both create and maintain white colonial logics, Subjects of the Sun will provoke important conversations about the symbiotic relationship between racial capitalism and energy systems and how they reproduce one another.”
-- Cymene Howe, author of Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene