Asolarity: Weaponized Sunlight

Ian J. Alexander (author)

Nicole Starosielski (author)

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Metadata
Title	Asolarity
Subtitle	Weaponized Sunlight
Contributor	Ian J. Alexander (author)
Contributor	Nicole Starosielski (author)
DOI	https://doi.org/10.53288/0404.1.12
Landing page	https://punctumbooks.com/titles/solarities-elemental-encounters-and-refractions/
License	https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Copyright	Ian J. Alexander, Nicole Starosielski
Publisher	punctum books
Published on	2023-11-22
Long abstract	Even as it is broadcast across the planet’s surface, sunlight is not an equally accessible resource. It is mediated by social practices that position some bodies in the sun, while depriving others of sunlight. Even if most phenomena are entangled with the sun, “solar media” refract these rays through a political topography, and as a result, sunlight manifests as social form. In this article, we discuss how solar violences not only work via exposure and overexposure, but also through the asolar, the creation of social forms in which sunlight is not only absent, but blocked as a means of inflicting bodily harm and social disaggregation. We focus on one site where the asolar has long been a means of violence: the prison. Describing a critical struggle against the South Carolina Department of Corrections, and the broader context of using solar media in solitary confinement, we explore how asolar environments have been weaponized. In turn, we argue that counter-mediations of sunlight made by those held captive articulate a re-distribution of sunlight as necessary to freedom.
Page range	pp. 133–147
Print length	15 pages
Language	English (Original)
Keywords	sunlight deprivation incarceration prison violence solar

Contributors

Ian J. Alexander

(author)

visiting lecturer in the Department of American Studies at Wellesley College

Ian J. Alexander is a writer and educator from Clarion County, Pennsylvania. He studies the history of the US prison regime, revolutionary and abolitionist prisoners’ movements, and media histories. In his research, he approaches media and media technologies as sites of struggle inside prisons and across prison walls. By looking at technologies such as radio, television, mail, digital tablets, telephones, and isolation chambers variously as tools of oppression, reform, and liberation, his work brings critical prison studies and abolitionist methods together with media studies and media history. Ian is currently a visiting lecturer in the Department of American Studies at Wellesley College.

Nicole Starosielski

(author)

Professor of Media at New York University

Nicole Starosielski, Professor of Media at New York University, is author or co-editor of over thirty articles and five books media, infrastructure, and environments, including: The Undersea Network (Duke UP, 2015), Media Hot and Cold (Duke UP, 2021), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (University of Illinois Press, 2015), Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (Routledge, 2016), and Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media (Duke UP, 2021), as well as co-editor of the “Elements” series at Duke University Press. Starosielski’s most recent project involves working with the subsea cable industry — which lays the transnational links of the internet — to make digital infrastructures more sustainable.