Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis

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 Guanahaní, 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.

In stunning, lyrical prose, Goffe dismantles our longest-held notions about island utopias and proposes new modes of thinking about the ruin and restoration of the environment.

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 cureently 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, South Atlantic Quarterly, Small Axe, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Vulture, and Boston Review.