Dark Laboratory - by Tao Leigh Goffe (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Award-winning historian, professor, and journalist Tao Leigh Goffe, launches an investigation of the Caribbean as the seat of corrupt Western wealth and environmental exploitation. When Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean island of Guanahanâi, it was remade, at least in mythology, as Eden. Since then, the Caribbean and its peoples have paid the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuses, falling prey to the planting of sugarcane and other cash crops. In Dark Laboratory, Goffe embarks on a historical journey into the influences that have made these islands-from Jamaica and Aruba to Cuba and Martinique-a target of Western capitalism and the foundation of the global economy as we know it today. Through the lens of personal and family memoir, as well as cultural and social history, Goffe seeks to radically transform how we conceive of Blackness, natural history, colonialism, and the climate crisis. Her writing considers the legacy of slavery and indentured servitude as Chinese laborers worked alongside enslaved Black people to excavate products like sugarcane and guano-in its day more valuable than gold-from these island nations. How can we combat contemporary racism and environmental degradation using the Caribbean and its dark history as guide? In autobiographical writing that shines light on both environmental upheaval and racial subjugation, Goffe offers solutions based on island ecologies, locating the origins of racism and the climate catastrophe in the colonization of the Caribbean. Her combination of personal narrative and research provides a record of the violence that has shaped these nations and a testament to our capacity for renewal."--

Book Synopsis

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 is a gargantuan, soulful work. It 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 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.

Review Quotes

One of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 History Books This Fall - One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025

"Groundbreaking." --The Guardian

"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." --The New York Times Book Review

"Dark Laboratory is stunning, brilliant and transformative. With a vast archive and a mighty pen, Tao Leigh Goffe tells the story of modernity and its discontents through the land, legacy, and people of the Caribbean. Upon reading this book, you will have a new understanding of the world." --Imani Perry, National Book Award-winning author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

"Dark Laboratory is a gargantuan, soulful work. It 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

"Dark Laboratory takes readers by the hand and guides them from mountain tops to coral reefs, from Jamaica to China, from the story of one family to that of our planet, from the pasts that have made us to a future we can still imagine. At once expansive and intimate, Dark Laboratory is an ambitious, genre-busting book." --Ada Ferrer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cuba: An American History

"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." --Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces

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

"Sweeping and sacred, Dark Laboratory stands as a singular text, leading readers through the dense layers of racial and colonial sedimentation that shape our present while radically reimagining a livable future on our rapidly warming planet." --Ruha Benjamin, author of Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want

"In this roving, erudite debut study, Goffe...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...scintillating...bursts with keen insights and connections." --Publishers Weekly *starred review*

"The best writing in any form leaves the reader with something to ponder, and Goffe's criticism of, and skepticism about, nearly every aspect of Western academic assumptions concerning the climate crisis, imperialism, and race does just that...A timely and provocative study." --Kirkus Reviews

"[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." -Shelf Awareness

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 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. Her writing has been published in or is forthcoming from peer-reviewed academic and more public-oriented journals including South Atlantic Quarterly, Small Axe, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Vulture, and Boston Review.