Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis

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.

"Dark Laboratory does the gargantuan, soulful work for slowing down the velocity, scope and impact of American and European exploitation of the Caribbean. 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

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahan? to find an Edenic beauty 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, 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 excavating the islands' bounty. Along with sugarcane, guano, at the time, was more valuable than gold.

Through the lens of memoir--and shot through with cultural and social history--Goffe radically transforms how we conceive of Blackness, natural history, colonialism, and the climate crisis, dismantling the many layers of entrenched imperialist thinking to reveal the cause and effect of a global human catastrophe. Her deeply lyrical, fluid writing forces a reckoning with the received forms of knowledge that, as she proves so deftly, have led us astray.

Using the Caribbean as both warning and guide, Goffe offers solutions based on island ecologies, closely situating the origins of racism and climate catastrophe in a colonial context. And in redressing these twin apocalypses, Dark Laboratory becomes a record of the violence that continues to shape the Caribbean today.

Goffe has written an impassioned, urgent testament to the capacity for change and renewal.

Author: Tao Leigh Goffe
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Published: 01/21/2025
Pages: 384
Binding Type: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780385549912

About the Author
TAO LEIGH GOFFE is a London-born, Black British award-winning writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York. Her research explores Black diasporic intellectual histories, political, and ecological life. She is a member of NEW INC, the New Museum's incubator for art and technology in New York City. She studied English literature at Princeton University before pursuing a PhD at Yale University and is cureently an Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY. Dr. Goffe has held academic positions and fellowships at Leiden University in the Netherlands and Princeton University in New Jersey. Her writing has been published in or is forthcoming from peer-reviewed academic and more public-oriented journals, South Atlantic Quarterly, Small Axe, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Vulture, and Boston Review.