Tao Leigh Goffe is a professor of cultural history and the founder of the multi-disciplinary arts collective Dark Laboratory. Her work explores the interconnections between race and climate, as does her book of the same title.
The book looks mainly at the Caribbean, and how the legacy of plantation slavery echoes through the region’s experience of climate change. I say ‘mainly’ because as a writer of Jamaican and Chinese descent, Goffe brings an unusual perspective. She compares and contrasts experiences between the Caribbean and Hong Kong, both island experiments in occupation and extraction. As I discuss in my own book on climate and race, the author sees the “climate crisis as an ongoing colonial crisis.”
Goffe takes elements of biodiversity as a starting point in each chapter, and then spirals outwards in theme, bringing together notes on history, geography and ecology. One chapter looks at natural history museums, birdwatching, and the colonial instinct to name and classify wildlife, erasing indigenous names for things on the way. Another connects the guano trade through to Trump’s ranting about “shithole countries.”
These spirallings often end up a long way from where they started, spinning off in unexpected and creative directions. A chapter begins with a plantation owner importing mongooses from India to control rats, but instead they decimated local wildlife. One of the mongooses was pregnant while on the ship, which leads into a description of how mongooses practice collective parenting. Next we’re in Rudyard Kipling’s stories for children, which feature a mongoose that protects and serves his white protagonists. Like many colonial children, Kipling was breastfed by an Indian nanny, as the empire suckled India in ways metaphorical and literal.
In one chapter Goffe writes about her art, and it did not surprise me to discover that she works in collage. Neither was it a surprise to find out later in the book that she also DJs. There is a crate-digging sensibility to Dark Laboratory, a sense of ideas being cut and pasted to see what happens when you put them alongside each other. New possibilities emerge in the collision of ideas, including the hopeful possibility of healing and restoration.
The downside of this intellectual island-hopping is that Dark Laboratory did lose me along the way sometimes, and I found it hard to follow the thread of the argument. There are ideas that we only get glimpses of, like the flash of a bird in the branches. A section on the Jamaican slave resistance suggests that we need “Maroon climate science”, for example – but then puts no further elaboration behind that potentially evocative phrase.
My hesitation is more to do with my own preferences than any authorial shortcomings. The book is well written and the constant divergences and convergences of the text are entirely deliberate – an apt way of showing how racial inequality runs like mycellium through the story of climate. This is a book about interconnections, about allowing different lines of thought to cross-pollinate each other. In that sense I admire what it’s doing and appreciate its insights, even if it didn’t quite click with me as a reading experience.
- You can order Dark Laboratory from Earthbound Books.
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