Subjects of the Sun

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

Preface ix Introduction: A Microgrid on the Margins 1 1. Shine 37 2. Space 77 3. Modules and Metrics 139 4. Bodies 211 Acknowledgments 281 Notes 283 Bibliography 295 Index 312

"An exquisitely crafted call to action! With incisive ethnography and a sharp theoretical lens, Myles Lennon delivers a powerful critique of the dominant visual narratives surrounding solar energy. Lennon's focus on the tension between digital utopias and the lived, embodied experience of energy production challenges us to rethink our relationship to energy, labor, and the environment in ways that truly honor both people and planet. A must-read for anyone serious about environmental justice and the complexities of technological progress." - Ruha Benjamin, author of (Imagination: A Manifesto) "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) "With generosity and care, Myles Lennon shows us how community environmental justice work can unwittingly reproduce the structures it wishes to counter. We learn how racial capitalism is not only driving climate change, it also dwells in the mundane details of datafication and solar panel placement. Lennon reminds us to orient to the materialities of sun, relationships, and feeling instead of screens and tech as crucibles of justice." - M. Murphy, author of (The Economization of Life)