Today, solar power merely fuels capitalism and imperialism. But drawing power from the sun is so radical it might transform that status quo.

Stacey Balkan
Stacey Balkan is Associate Professor of Environmental Literature and Humanities at Florida Atlantic University where she also serves as an affiliate faculty member for the university’s Center for Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation. She is the author of Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India (West Virginia University Press, 2022); co-editor, with Dr. Swaralipi Nandi, of Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere (Penn State Press, 2021); and collaborator on the collectively-authored Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice (Minneapolis, 2022). Stacey’s current book project, which investigates the racialized frontiers of extractive capitalism, is provisionally titled Black Anthropocene Vistas. Dr. Balkan’s recent work also appears in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Revue Études Anglaises, Energy Humanities, The Global South, Global South Studies, Mediations, and Social Text.
Injustice in the Breeze
Energy companies promise to “go green.” Yet they use the same forms of extractive capitalism that have destroyed the planet’s climate.
A Just Future for Cycling?
I occupy three precarious categories: South Florida resident, humanities professor, and cyclist. The last, however, is a condition afforded to me because of ...
India’s Garbage Politics
Writing in 1993, after decades spent documenting America’s shifting landscapes, poet A. R. Ammons suggested that “garbage [ought] to be the poem of our time.” Inspired by “mounds of disposal” along a ...
Anthropocene and Empire
In the autumn of 1839, an unusually strong tropical storm devastated coastal communities along the Bay of Bengal in what was then the English East India Company’s premier settlement. A decade later ...