Dark Laboratory
On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis
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- £11.99
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 dramatic 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 vibrant and complex history of the islands back to 1492 and the arrival of Christopher Columbus when the Caribbean became the subject of Western exploitation. Charting the human and ecological forces that have shaped the islands, Goffe examines the legacy of fierce warrior Queen Nanny of the Maroons, engages in pressing cultural debate about stolen artefacts and human remains which are kept hidden in museum archives, and visits Indigenous farming cooperatives who are using ancestral knowledge to rebuild their communities.
Using the Caribbean as both a warning and a guide, Dark Laboratory takes hopeful and galvanizing teachings from the islands communities to offer illuminating solutions to the ecological crisis. From guano to sugarcane, coral bleaching to invasive mongoose populations, Dark Laboratory is a lyrical, vibrant and urgent investigation into the greatest threat facing humanity.
‘Noble and necessary . . . Goffe’s ear is tuned to songs of resistance, to what it looks like to make life amid (and after) colonial subjugation’ New York Times
‘Thoroughly compelling . . . Every page is mixed with heart and conviction’ Monique Roffey
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.
