Overview

A groundbreaking investigation of the Caribbean as both an idyll in the American imagination and a dark laboratory of Western experimentation, revealing secrets to racial and environmental progress that impact how we live today. “Goffe’s ear is tuned to songs of resistance, to what it looks like to make life amid (and after) colonial subjugation…noble and necessary.”  —The New York Times Book Review “Dark Laboratory is stunning….With a vast archive and a mighty pen, Tao Leigh Goffe tells the story of modernity and its discontents through the land, legacy, and people of the Caribbean….You will have a new understanding of the world.”  —Imani Perry, National Book Award-winning author of South to America In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands’ bounty—including guano, which, at the time, was more valuable than gold—for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies. Braiding together family history, cultural reportage, and social studies, Goffe radically transforms how we conceive of Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis; and, in doing so, she deftly dismantles the many layers of entrenched imperialist thinking that shroud our established understanding of the human and environmental conditions to reveal the cause and effect of a global catastrophe. Dark Laboratory forces a reckoning with the received forms of knowledge that have led us astray. Through the lens of the Caribbean, both guide and warning of the man-made disasters that continue to plague our world, Goffe closely situates the origins of racism and climate catastrophe within a colonial context. And in redressing these twin apocalypses, Dark Laboratory becomes a record of the violence that continues to shape the Caribbean today. But it is also a declaration of hope, offering solutions toward a better future based on knowledge gleaned from island ecosystems, and an impassioned, urgent testament to the human capacity for change and renewal.

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9780385549912

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Reviews

One of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 History Books of Fall 2024 “Dark Laboratory does the gargantuan, soulful work for slowing down the velocity, scope and impact of American and European exploitation of the Caribbean. Absolutely foundational to understanding the conundrum of raced experimentation and mining in the West. Dark Laboratory doesn't simply bend; rather, it deftly obliterates most of what I thought I knew about the Caribbean's utility to Western wealth.” —Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy

One of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 History Books of Fall 2024 “Dark Laboratory is a gargantuan, soulful work. It obliterates most of what I thought I knew about the Caribbean’s utility to Western wealth.” —Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy “Dark Laboratory is an urgent exploration of race, climate, and the devastating colonial experimentation with human lives and the natural world. It explodes conventional thinking about the crushing effects of profit-mongering, then unexpectedly, leads us back to sources of original power and ways of knowing who we are. Tao Leigh Goffe is a courageous, big-picture thinker who leaves no leaf unturned.” —Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces “From past to present and island to island, with wisdom and lyricism, Tao Leigh Goffe shows that we cannot honestly reckon with the global climate crisis without acknowledging its roots in the cultural, social, and ecological upheavals first inflicted on the so-called New World and its peoples in 1492—and for centuries thereafter. Yet from this darkness, she offers light.” —Jack E. Davis, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea

One of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 History Books of Fall 2024 “Dark Laboratory is a gargantuan, soulful work. It obliterates most of what I thought I knew about the Caribbean’s utility to Western Wealth.” —Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy “Dark Laboratory is an urgent exploration of race, climate, and the devastating colonial experimentation with human lives and the natural world. It explodes conventional thinking about the crushing effects of profit-mongering, then unexpectedly, leads us back to sources of original power and ways of knowing who we are. Tao Leigh Goffe is a courageous, big-picture thinker who leaves no leaf unturned.” —Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces

“Dark Laboratory does the gargantuan, soulful work for slowing down the velocity, scope and impact of American and European exploitation of the Caribbean. Absolutely foundational to understanding the conundrum of raced experimentation and mining in the West. Dark Laboratory doesn't simply bend; rather, it deftly obliterates most of what I thought I knew about the Caribbean's utility to Western wealth.” —Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy

Author Information

Tao Leigh Goffe is an award-winning writer and sound artist who grew up between London, where she was born, and New York City. She studied English literature at Princeton University before earning a PhD at Yale University and is a professor of environmental humanities at Hunter College, CUNY and earth sciences at the CUNY Grad Center. Her writing has been published in Vulture, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Boston Review. She lives and works in Manhattan.

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