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Summary and Reviews of Dark Laboratory by Tao Goffe

Dark Laboratory by Tao Leigh Goffe

Dark Laboratory

On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis

by Tao Leigh Goffe
  • Critics' Consensus (4):
  • First Published:
  • Jan 21, 2025, 384 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

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.

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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Reviews

Media Reviews

Kirkus Reviews
Goffe engages with complex ideas and history, and the book is not the easiest of reads. But she proves to be an engaging scholar, and her work will go far in reshaping academic approaches to her most interesting subject matter. A timely and refreshingly provocative study.

New York Times Book Review
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.

Shelf Awareness
[Goffe] calls readers to rethink their relationships to environments, to rethink the idea of ownership and belonging, and so also rethink the idea of climate justice for everyone…compelling.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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...This scintillating study bursts with keen insights and connections.

Author Blurb Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces
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.

Author Blurb Jack E. Davis, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea
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.

Author Blurb Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy
Dark Laboratory is a gargantuan, soulful work. It obliterates most of what I thought I knew about the Caribbean's utility to Western wealth.

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