Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Most Anticipated Books of 2025!

Summary and Reviews of Dark Laboratory by Tao Goffe

Dark Laboratory by Tao Leigh Goffe

Dark Laboratory

On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis

by Tao Leigh Goffe
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (5):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • First Published:
  • Jan 21, 2025, 384 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

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 ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

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...continued

Full Review (620 words)

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today.

(Reviewed by Michelle Anya Anjirbag).

Media Reviews

Kirkus Reviews
Goffe engages with complex ideas and history, and the book is not the easiest of reads. But she proves to be an engaging scholar, and her work will go far in reshaping academic approaches to her most interesting subject matter. A timely and refreshingly provocative study.

New York Times Book Review
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.

Shelf Awareness
[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.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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...This scintillating study bursts with keen insights and connections.

Author Blurb Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces
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.

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

Author Blurb Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy
Dark Laboratory is a gargantuan, soulful work. It obliterates most of what I thought I knew about the Caribbean's utility to Western wealth.

Reader Reviews

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



Countertexts and Shifting Perspectives

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...

This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Dark Laboratory, try these:

  • Dispersals jacket

    Dispersals

    by Jessica J. Lee

    Published 2025

    About this book

    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

  • The Light Eaters jacket

    The Light Eaters

    by Zoƫ Schlanger

    Published 2024

    About this book

    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.

We have 5 read-alikes for Dark Laboratory, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    The Frozen River
    by Ariel Lawhon
    From the bestselling author of I Was Anastasia comes a historical mystery inspired by 18th-century midwife Martha Ballard, who investigates a shocking murder.
  • Book Jacket
    The Bluest Eye
    by Toni Morrison
    The story of a black girl in America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others. First published 1970; won the 1993 Nobel Prize.
  • Book Jacket
    The Wager
    by David Grann
    From the bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a gripping story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Harlem Rhapsody
    by Victoria Christopher Murray

    The extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance.

  • Book Jacket

    Three Days in June
    by Anne Tyler

    A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.

  • Book Jacket

    Beast of the North Woods
    by Annelise Ryan

    When a local fisherman is mauled to death, it seems like the only possible cause is a mythical creature.

Who Said...

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

D to T N

and be entered to win..