This week on The Write Question, host Lauren Korn speaks with Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe: theorist, interdisciplinary artist, and author of Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, The Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (Doubleday, Penguin Random House). Part memoir, part cultural reportage, and part social study, Dark Laboratory radically transforms how we conceive of Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis by centering the imagination and play. Dark Laboratory is a new ontology for both the old world and the future world we are all hoping to inhabit.
About the book:
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, 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.
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.
This conversation has been edited for time.
About Tao:
Tao Leigh Goffe is a London-born, Black British award-winning writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the U.K. and New York. She is the founder and Executive Director of Dark Laboratory, and her research explores Black diasporic intellectual histories, political, and ecological life. She studied English literature at Princeton University before pursuing a PhD at Yale University. She lives and works in Manhattan where she is currently 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.
Mentioned in this episode:
Dark Laboratory, a collaborative and creative research space, housed at Hunter College
“Stolen Life, Stolen Time: Black Temporality, Speculation, and Racial Capitalism” by Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe (South Atlantic Quarterly)
Black Capital, Chinese Debt: On the Racial and Economic Origins of the Plantation Debt Crisis and Modern Capitalism (forthcoming, Duke University Press)
Tao Leigh Goffe (and the Dark Lab Book Club*) recommends:
Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, Vol. 1 by Angela Davis (Haymarket Books)
Mandarin Brazil by Ana Paulina Lee (Stanford University Press)
Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry (Ecco Press)
Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization by Kuan-Hsing Chen (Duke University Press)
When We Ruled: The Rise and Fall of Twelve African Queens and Warriors by Paula Akpan (forthcoming, Pegasus Books)
An A-Z of Chinese Food (Recipes Not Included) by Jenny Lau (Renegade Books)
*For more Dark Lab Book Club titles, follow the Dark Laboratory on Instagram
Lauren Korn recommends:
Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, The Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis by Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe (Doubleday, Penguin Random House)
No Archive Will Restore You (Punctum Books) and The Breaks (Coffee House Press) by a Julietta Singh
Borealis: An Essay by Aisha Sabatini Sloan (Coffee House Press)
A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars edited by Erin Sharky (Milkweed Editions)
Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry (Ecco Press)
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson (Ballantine Books)
The collages of Lorna Simpson
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The Write Question team is Lauren Korn, host, co-producer, and editor; and Chris Moyles, co-producer and sound engineer. This episode is supported by Chapter One Bookstore in Hamilton, Montana, a literary and community resource for the Bitterroot Valley—providing space to explore, discover, and share passions since 1974. More information can be found at Chapter1Bookstore.com.
The Write Question logo and brand (2022) was designed by Molly Russell. You can see more of her work at iamthemollruss.com and on Instagram @iamthemollruss.
Funding for The Write Question comes from Humanities Montana; members of Montana Public Radio; and from the Greater Montana Foundation—encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans.
The Write Question is a production of Montana Public Radio.
