Dark Laboratory
On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
'An exhilarating, urgent work . . . [Dark Laboratory] threads together ecological and human crises in an original, glittering web’ Afua Hirsch
From award-winning writer and theorist Tao Leigh Goffe, an urgent investigation into the intertwined history of colonialism and the climate crisis – and the lessons we can learn to fight for a better world.
Our planet is on the precipice of ecological breakdown and climate despair is at an all-time high. But there are many communities who have survived beyond the environmental destruction wrought on them by colonialism – and they hold the solutions for climate repair.
Using the Caribbean as a case study, Tao Leigh Goffe traces the history of the islands back to the arrival of Christopher Columbus, when the Caribbean became the subject of Western exploitation. Charting the ecological forces that have shaped the islands – from guano to coral reefs, sugarcane to mongooses – and learning from Black, Indigenous and Asian island histories, Goffe makes the argument that the extractivist capitalism that is the origin of the climate crisis is borne from colonial thinking – and that to fight one effectively is to fight both.
Treating the Caribbean as both a warning and a guide, Dark Laboratory is a lyrical, vibrant and urgent investigation into the greatest threat facing humanity.
‘Noble and necessary’ New York Times
'A work of searching curiosity and intelligence' Ekow Eshun
'Necessary, compelling and utterly unique' Monique Roffey
'Relentlessly engaging . . . shows us new ways to live' The Atlantic
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this roving, erudite debut study, Goffe, a professor of literary theory and cultural history at Hunter College, traces the attitudes and beliefs that undergird today's climate crisis back to the racist, extractive systems of thought developed by European colonizers in previous centuries. Beginning with Jamaica and Hong Kong, the ancestral homes of her parents, she ruminates on the relationships between capitalist exploitation, racist hierarchies, Indigenous knowledge, and the land. In poetic and associative prose, which leaps from one idea to another in an ever-widening gyre, she surfaces searing details from around the world that exemplify how the landscapes of colonized countries became "primitivized" in the same measure as the inhabitants became "otherized" (the landscape quite explicitly being anthropomorphized as a hostile colonial subject, like with sailors' offensive terminology "niggerheads" for perilous coral reefs) and how these new racial hierarchies were embodied in one of the colonial era's most important extractive industries: the harvesting of bird guano as fertilizer. Much of Goffe's narrative involves pointing out how deep these systems of thought run in foundational Western texts and ideas: for instance, in a canny reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson's lyrical writing on how guano could bring agricultural abundance to the Great Plains, she notes that Emerson naturalized the fact of guano's importation, thus "exemplifying how nature writing is often about colonial ambition." This scintillating study bursts with keen insights and connections.
