Shine Available to Purchase
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Published:May 2025
Chapter 1, “Shine,” focuses on shiny images of pastoral solar farms in a place that couldn’t be further from pastoral: New York City. These images depict anthropogenic technologies as a natural outgrowth of the nonhuman world, situating solar infrastructure in an imaginary of pure nature. As such, they suggest that solar collapses one of the foundational divisions of racial capitalism: the nature/society divide that renders the nonhuman world as extractable terrain. This collapse informs late liberal visions of high-tech commodities that can paradoxically “return” alienated communities of color to a premodern state of purity, obfuscating solar’s extractive and exploitative supply chains. Lennon attributes this obfuscatory naturalization not only to the fetishistic workings of capital but also to the affective power of the sun. Specifically, he shows how the sun’s shine, glimmer, and interactions with the built environment affectively naturalize anthropogenic solar infrastructure, challenging Marxian orthodoxy on commodity fetishism.
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