Dark Laboratory

Starred review from November 18, 2024
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. Beginning with Jamaica and Hong Kong, the ancestral homes of her parents, she ruminates on the relationships between capitalist exploitation, racist hierarchies, Indigenous knowledge, and the land. In poetic and associative prose, which leaps from one idea to another in an ever-widening gyre, she surfaces searing details from around the world that exemplify how the landscapes of colonized countries became “primitivized” in the same measure as the inhabitants became “otherized” (the landscape quite explicitly being anthropomorphized as a hostile colonial subject, like with sailors’ offensive terminology “niggerheads” for perilous coral reefs) and how these new racial hierarchies were embodied in one of the colonial era’s most important extractive industries: the harvesting of bird guano as fertilizer. Much of Goffe’s narrative involves pointing out how deep these systems of thought run in foundational Western texts and ideas: for instance, in a canny reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lyrical writing on how guano could bring agricultural abundance to the Great Plains, she notes that Emerson naturalized the fact of guano’s importation, thus “exemplifying how nature writing is often about colonial ambition.” This scintillating study bursts with keen insights and connections.

December 1, 2024
A noted academic challenges traditional interpretations of race, the environment, and economic progress. "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. Goffe is an associate professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, and her extensively footnoted research lends academic rigor to her chronicle of this interconnectedness, in addition to the intriguing and creative solutions that she offers. This is also a deeply personal book. At times, Goffe's forays into her own heritage can get overly speculative, but they add necessary perspective and an insightful vantage point to the importance of ancestral knowledge and its relevance to unwinding traditional narratives of Blackness and the forced labor of Chinese workers. Her ear for nature's notes is just as sharp as those of naturalists Hans Sloane and Theodore Roosevelt, who are but two figures that come under her withering scrutiny. 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.

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