LMN is delighted to announce our fifth Resisting Mining Book Club of 2025 with guest speaker Myles Lennon, who will be discussing his book, Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2025).
About the book
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.
About the author
Myles is an environmental anthropologist and a former sustainable energy policy practitioner. His research explores how rooftop solar, “resiliency” microgrids, and other climate mitigation infrastructures simultaneously reinforce and upend entrenched structures of power as they materialize across long-standing race and class divisions in New York City. His current long-term research project is on young, Black land stewards’ complex efforts to navigate settler colonialism and redress white supremacy through land-based labour in the US.