Tao Leigh Goffe
“When you think about Africa and Asia, and diaspora, and identity formation and who participates in the different cultures that come out of those histories and experiences — that’s a conversation we should all be having about the intimacy of globalization. It doesn’t have to exclude anyone. It’s really about inclusiveness.”
“Dark Laboratory does the gargantuan, soulful work for slowing down the velocity, scope and impact of American and European exploitation of the Caribbean. It deftly obliterates most of what I thought I knew about the Caribbean’s utility to Western wealth.”
“Mountains hold the echoes of history,” writes Goffe in the opening of a fascinating narrative that confronts the historic dynamic of climate and race in the Caribbean and examines the region as an experimental center—a “dark laboratory”—that was exploited by the greed of Western capitalists, beginning when Columbus walked ashore on the island of Guanahani in 1492. 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.”
“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.”
Tao Leigh Goffe is an award-winning writer, sound artist, and professor specializing in histories of climate, race, empire, and technology. Her story was featured as an experimental short film on Hulu’s Initiative 29 that celebrates Black history, heroes, and futurism. Cookbook writing, curating exhibitions, and producing installation art, she explores the full range of the human sensorium in her research and artistic practice.
Her first book, Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean and the Origins of the Climate Crisis will be published by Doubleday in January 2025.
Born in London, United Kingdom, she lives and works in Manhattan. She studied English at Princeton University before earning her PhD from Yale University. Dr. Goffe is Associate Professor of literary theory and cultural history at Hunter College, CUNY. Her research is rooted in literature and theories of labor that center Black feminism’s engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations.
Dr. Goffe is the founding director of the Dark Laboratory, a collective on race and ecology where members develop stories using creative technology. Dr. Goffe is also the Executive Director of the Afro-Asia Group, an advisory organization with the mission of creating spaces of collaboration between African and Asian diasporas on futurity, solidarity, and infrastructure.
Dr. Goffe has held academic positions at Leiden University in the Netherlands and Princeton University. She has been interviewed and quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and by Vice Munchies. Her writing has been published in Artsy, South Atlantic Quarterly, Small Axe, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, and Boston Review. For her literary representation, please contact Janklow and Nesbit.
Open and right-click to download
(c) Tao Leigh Goffe
