Abolition solarities: Theorizing antiracist and anticapitalist solar energy insurrections

Abstract

We arrive at an auspicious inflection point in the proliferation of solar photovoltaic systems. Apprised of particular and patterned racial and gendered solar injustices across disparate energy geographies, scholars and practitioners must harness solar power in the service of the total abolition of racial power structures that enshrine inequalities in colonial-capitalist accumulation. Antiracist and anticapitalist approaches to solar interventions can potentially transform social relations and empower the victims of energy injustices. Abolition solarities avail emancipation and redistribution through dismantling white supremacist processes and logics that structure energy regimes. How can solar simultaneously stitch translocal and transnational nets of safety and solidarity among subaltern architects and inheritors of abolition democracy? Aspiring to the existential obligation to change everything, let us wire solar to elucidate emancipation.