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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
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Literary Fiction
Historical Fiction
Short Stories
Essays
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Romance
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Biography/Memoir
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Science, Health and the Environment
Poetry & Novels in Verse
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Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
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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.
Introduction
Mountain Ballads
Mountains hold the echoes of history. The vibrations and shock waves of the climate crisis are written in stone, absorbed over the course of geologic time dating back more than four billion years. These mountain ranges were once submerged underwater. If we measure the span of existence by the recent rock record, it tells a layered climate history of precious materials stolen from the earth-mountains of coral, gold, bauxite, and guano-sedimented. Time avalanches with the heaviness of histories of labor exploitation as we reckon with the overwhelming and inevitable ecological crises of the twenty-first century. Within each chapter of climate history exists a labor history, and we draw upon the energy of those who have gone before us. Those forced to extract from the land continue to be deemed disposable for the price of so-called technological progress. The racial regime determined who was forced to extract ores from the earth, and it continues to this day with unnamed millions mining cobalt to source lithium-ion batteries to satisfy the demand for the rechargeable batteries of our electric cars and smartphones.
This is our current perverse geological reality of powering so called green technologies and clean energy solutions. Standing at the precipice of climate collapse, we feel the increasing pressure for the planet to implode with each breath we take. Yet, as a global com munity, we continuously fail to address the origin of the problem. Without economic and historical analyses of the origins of the climate crisis, how can we expect to understand its sedimented layers?
While it is easy to picture plumes of smoke as the primary output of global warming, we must ask questions about the global economy that preceded our dependence on fossil fuels and what remains unseen. The brutal order of plantations organized the world before there were smokestacks and factories. The economies and ideas of plantation slavery have irreparably scarred the natural environment. Before idyllic pastures, mass deforestation was necessary to clear the way for farming. Plantation owners and overseers mutilated the flesh of those they held captive under the whip. With each tree felled, carbon was released into the atmosphere. Sacred branches, hundreds of years old, that had witnessed the first European colonizers were razed in an instant. Gone with this botanical life were the multitude of medicines and materials critical to Indigenous life and traditions. Vacating the land of vast and complex biomes and ecosystems, seventeenth-century monocrop agriculture transformed the planet as new agricultural practices stripped the soil of nutrients. While precious metals and rocks-gold, silver, and quarries of marble-had long been prized throughout the human history of mining, coal and oil have transformed how the world breathes. Agricultural and mining industries asphyxiate the future, the smoke emitted from fossil fuels burning our lungs as it propels a cycle of greed and disposability. Today, wind currents carry debris from faraway forest fires that irritate our airways as we inhale a sky turned a burnt shade of orange. The air is hazy and thick with the ashes of those who have been deemed disposable.
High in the mountains where the air is fresh, the land holds the memory of existential hope amid ecological catastrophes. Mountains carry messages that have been communicated across time and space. The land recalls things that we cannot. Across Black poetic traditions, mountains have held significant political, religious, and environmental meaning. "Go, tell it on the mountain." James Baldwin returned to the lyrics of the African American spiritual for his 1953 book. "Over the hills and everywhere." Initially, Baldwin was going to name his Jim Crow narrative Crying Holy; the sound of the Black Church in these mountain lyrics was Baldwin's choice for his urgent articulation.
During the nineteenth century, the lines ...
Excerpted from Dark Laboratory by Tao Leigh Goffe. Copyright © 2025 by Tao Leigh Goffe. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
When did globalization begin? Many authorities would place its start somewhere in the 20th century. But what if instead we think of the globalized modern era as beginning with Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Caribbean in 1492? How might this change how we think about the legacies of empire, colonialism, and the roots of climate crisis? For Tao Leigh Goffe, a writer, theorist, and artist who grew up acutely aware of how colonialism shaped the world, climate crisis and globalization are intrinsically linked to colonial pasts. In Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis, Goffe draws from some of the humanistic work of her research lab (also called Dark Laboratory) to help readers make these connections and interrogate what we think we know about the origins of climate change.
Goffe's lab combines research on climate, race, technology, and philosophy, working from the premise that "climate crisis cannot be solved without solving racial crisis." Dark Laboratory merges art with research in ways that center marginalized communities and non-Western forms of storytelling. This book, she explains, "is an attempt to write neither a revisionist history nor a science textbook. Instead, [Dark Laboratory] brings together historical evidence and scientific methods to ask urgent, philosophical questions about whether we want to live differently." By connecting today's climate crisis directly to the beginning of colonial expansion, Goffe draws a clear line through centuries of contact and exploitation to show that we cannot solve our climate problems without recognizing the implicit racism and violence that underscore them.
The Caribbean becomes her main case study, but she also follows the historical resonances of this region to other parts of the world such as Hong Kong, India, and Tahiti, which share similar histories marred by extraction and colonialism, and are still dealing with the fallout of those histories today. For her, these connections must be made to better understand that the "genocide of colonial encounter is ongoing" and to reframe the current climate crisis as "the consequences of a centuries-long cycle of exploitation of people of color, whom European colonial powers have forced to extract resources from the earth." Additionally, she explores how and where resistance has always been present, whether resistance to a colonial or imperial incursion; resistance to modernization for modernization's sake; or resistance to climate change through the refusal to succumb to the idea that there is only one way of facing an uncertain future, or to accept that humanity cannot change how they might live with each other. Many of these resisters plan to build something better in the face of so much violence and damage.
Goffe's scope is wide-ranging and dotted with her personal history; she understands the world she inhabits through discovery and exploration of her ancestral connections, examining how her mixed heritage is inflected with the aftereffects of colonialism. In doing so she makes a too often intellectualized problem — how to solve climate change — deeply intimate.
By tracing history in this way, she deftly folds together intertwined historical threads to make visible ecological destructions, racialized violence, and even the multiple apocalyptic events survived by Black and Indigenous peoples across the globe at the hands of Western colonization. But despite the darkness she still sees opportunities for change. Goffe invites readers to recognize that the current ecological conditions are the result of a lack of imagination, not the inevitable path of history running its course. If readers can see different ways of understanding the past, they just might be able to imagine different futures. Dark Laboratory presents the complex, poetic, beautiful climate work of this generation, and its clarion call is sure to provoke and challenge, while also opening windows into worlds too often unseen.
Reviewed by Michelle Anya Anjirbag
Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces
Jack E. Davis, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea
Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy
Dark Laboratory is an incredible reconfiguring of a historical moment that provides a new understanding of the current climate crisis and how it is intertwined with the legacies of colonialism. One way of thinking about the book is as a countertext to commonly taught histories of globalization, colonialism, and climate change. A countertext is a text or narrative that presents events from a different perspective. They are most frequently studied in literary and sociological contexts, but, as Tao Leigh Goffe proves, they can be equally important when contemplating history and the environment. A countertext can be a work of nonfiction or fiction, but in both cases, it is meant to add to, intervene in, or counteract the narratives that readers might think they know well. Countertexts can be written for many different purposes and from many different perspectives, but they always provide readers and learners with more information about a given subject than one would find in the mainstream reading.
There are expansive and flexible examples in fiction, from countertextual classic literature to reimaginings of popular culture staples. For example, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys provides readers with a clear vision of Mr. Rochester's first wife from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, through a postcolonial and feminist lens. Stephenie Meyer of Twilight Saga fame rewrote one of her own books from a different character's perspective. We even see this with Disney films, such as Cruella (2021) and Maleficent (2014), which expand viewers' perceptions of the titular iconic villains beyond simply being evil women.
Recent nonfiction examples include The 1619 Project by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, which critically examines significant moments and figures from US history pertaining to enslavement. Another would be the efforts of the National Trust in the United Kingdom to more clearly talk about the colonial histories of many of the great houses and estates it owns and preserves. Such projects counteract dominant narratives and let people who are often overlooked or actively oppressed have a voice and be seen in the historical record.
Goffe's work in Dark Laboratory, and in her research lab, awakens not only human histories that have been overlooked, but histories of lands before European colonization. By doing this work, Goffe has written an engaging and powerful countertext. Dark Laboratory intervenes in commonly known narratives about history, progress, and resource extraction, and invites readers to think a little bit more about how these narratives are intertwined with the current narratives about climate change. This alternate view is not counterfactual — it is not presenting a different set of facts or a different reality. It is instead encouraging people to look at information not always included in the stories we tell about climate, history, and modernity. By doing so, Goffe also encourages us to look at perspectives often ignored, and to pursue a more complex narrative that considers how people move across the globe, and were moved and continue to be moved by imperial powers, as well as how the roots of climate change were sown long ago.
Countertexts are an important part of expanding the narrative of human existence, whether in fiction or in nonfiction works. They do not just encourage readers to ask who might be missing from history or historical contexts, but they reinsert them into what we know about different periods of time, and in doing so, can shift or widen readers' perspectives.
Filed under Society and Politics
A prize-winning memoirist and nature writer turns to the lives of plants entangled in our human world to explore belonging, displacement, identity, and the truths of our shared future
Award-winning Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger delivers a groundbreaking work of popular science that probes the hidden world of the plant kingdom and reveals the astonishing capabilities of the green life all around us.
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