Tao Leigh Goffe, "Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis" (Doubleday Books, 2025)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hello everyone and welcome to New Books in Anthropology, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Regan Gillum, a host on the channel, and today I'm talking to Dr. Tao Lee Goff, who is the author of the book Dark Laboratory on Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis, published by Penguin Random House and Doubleday. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Goff.

Regan, it's so lovely to be here. I'm a really big fan of your part of the New Books Network in particular, so it's just thrilling to actually be here in the chair with you. I'm dialing in from New York City, and I'm here with my little co-pilot, co-author, my dragon baby. But this book is a dragon book.

coming out in 2025, but just before the Lunar New Year. So it's really exciting to be able to speak with you today about what that journey has been. Thank you.

Great. Thank you so much. And I'm really excited to talk with you about the book. And it was delightful to see the baby as well. I think it's great to see him and to think about the future, right? That I think this book is also wanting us to think about as well.

And so in Dark Laboratory, you examine the histories that have created the conditions for the climate crisis. But before we get into talking about the book, I wanted to ask you about yourself and how you came to write Dark Laboratory.

Sure. I'm a professor of Black Studies. I teach at Hunter College, which is part of the City University of New York. And the Dark Laboratory is a concept, but it's also a physical location. So we're on the 16th floor of the West Building at 68th and Lexington. And I

The questions of the lab are the questions of the book on Columbus, the Caribbean, and the origins of the climate crisis. This is a vexing matter that has kept me up at night for, I want to say, the past 15 years at least, because I am in so many ways a daughter and a granddaughter of the Caribbean, but also of Hong Kong. So the book is a love letter to islands,

I think about New York City and the fact that it's an archipelago of more than 40 islands. I was born in the UK, which is part of the...

British Isles, as it were, when we think about the North Sea and the Atlantic and transatlantic histories, especially of racial slavery. So yeah, to say that the book is about me is an understatement, but it's also about the broader world and the ways in which we are

addressing the future. So the future that's unborn, the future that we want to be able to be born and the question of how not to betray it. So it started in 2017 and it really was, yeah, a labor of love, which I thought would be my second book and ended up becoming my first published book.

Wow, that is fascinating to hear that story. I like how you described it as a love letter to islands. And that's interesting, too, that it was that it became your your first book that you hadn't been planning on.

And so you kind of began with this where you talked about the Dark Laboratory. And so the title of the book is Dark Laboratory on Columbus, the Caribbean and the Origins of the Climate Crisis. But as you just said, the Dark Laboratory is also an actual organization that's run by you with a physical place.

And I'm going to quote you and you say, we at the lab understand that the climate crisis cannot be solved without solving the racial crisis. So I wondered if you could talk about this link between climate and the racial crisis and what Dark Laboratory is about.

Yes, that's a really compelling question. And it really takes me through a genealogy of Black thought and especially of Black geographers who I follow in the path of, especially Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who is teaching as part of CUNY. She encouraged me to enroll in a seminar at the Grad Center this year on

environmentalism and anti-capitalism. And her work, as well as Clyde Woods, has really set a path for a lot of people to think through racial and climate crisis and this notion of planned abandonment. So it's not lost on me that we are 20 years, and I can barely believe it, since Hurricane Katrina. And I've always thought about New Orleans as the northernmost, perhaps, city of the Caribbean.

But the fact that the Caribbean Studies Association held a conference there in one year has really made me think about Jamaica and the circuitry of islands with the economy and especially the plantation economy of New Orleans. So the fact that Clyde Woods was writing from this perspective,

on the blues and conceptualizing things in this way feels like part of a Black radical tradition that I'm excited to enter Dark Laboratory into because I find that

Wherever it is in the world, it seems to be that those who've been pushed to the edge of society, but also the edge of the map and often in coastal regions that are undergoing coastal erosion, you'll find Afro-Indigenous people, Black and or Indigenous folks who really are the protectors of the climate. So I was lucky to receive a Ford Foundation grant

to make a film about these questions, which is the next stage of this book. And it will look at coastal erosion in New Orleans compared with Long Island, which I lived near to, and in conversation with Jamaica, looking at coastal communities. So for me, it's intertwined. I think it was surprising to a lot of editors when we were selling the book, because this is a trade book that

one would require the other, climate justice and racial justice. A lot of white editors said, "Are you saying that we really need to solve one to solve the other?" So they really thought it could be done in sequential order. And it made me realize that even though I've devoted 15 years of my life to this study, we have to begin with that really crucial definition of justice that has to reckon with race and the environment together.

Yeah, thank you for that. And I think that kind of leads into my next question. And so I wanted to begin with this idea that I was listening to the NAP ministry and I

And it's run by this woman named Tricia Hersey, who calls herself the nap bishop. And she encourages basically black people to rest. And she talks about like rest is reparations. But one of the things she was saying, I was listening to her on a podcast. She was saying that we already live in someone else's imagination. And she was saying this in reference to the fact that sometimes people will call for reparations.

you know, alternative life ways, but they may not understand or they sort of don't say that we already live in someone else's imagination. The world is not neutral. It's already been like constructed by, you know, someone else's idea of it. And it's a colonial imagination. And I thought about this in chapter one of your book in Island Laboratories, when you write about exploring plants and nature with maroons in Jamaica. And one thing you say is like,

What happens when some people who you just mentioned, like the racialized people pushed to the edge, what happens when they don't get a seat at the table to determine what's going to happen? And so I wondered if you could talk about how maroons privilege the natural environment rather than like extraction that occurs in Jamaica. Yeah.

I have to answer that question with Grandie Nanny or Queen Nanny of the Maroons. And hers is an incredible story that takes us to before 1738 and the treaty that the Maroons of Jamaica signed with the British. And it takes us to this question of Black sovereignty. So I think that the call of the different Maroons

thinkers that you are mentioning to prioritize rest is a fascinating one because it really calls us to question modern capitalism and the work ethic as well as the colonial clock.

that orders life and steals time. I have an article called Stolen Life, Stolen Time, and I'm really preoccupied with how it is that enslaved Black people were able to steal time away in the space of the plantation, but also beyond it. So maroonage, not as a metaphor, but as an actual reality, was exciting for me to begin the book with in chapter one, as you mentioned.

So, yeah, I just feel really privileged to be in community with a lot of Black environmentalist scholars, like Dr. Leo Douglas, who is a birdwatcher and biological conservationist, who was able to curate an exhibition on Queen Nanny of the Maroons at the Institute of Jamaica, which is essentially the Natural History Museum of Jamaica. And

The exhibition of which I was a part was called Queen Nanny, and it reimagined her as a climate warrior, as a healer, as a herbalist. So it really brought this idea of Black and Indigenous science into focus for me in the artwork, the painting that I produced, and also a sound sculpture piece.

that I produced, which was about Black sovereignty and also about refusal. So it was wonderful to think about the intonations of different Black ways of saying no through that work and to sit with the maroon philosophy, which I talk about in that first chapter.

So exploring plants and nature is key to the way they see the world and to the environment that they adapted to. And there were many, I guess, similarities that they saw from West Africa and what became known as the Gold Coast with Jamaica in terms of the woodlands. And they found refuge there. So I'm endlessly just fascinated by nature.

this question of extraction when it comes to ethnobotany, but also the ways in which the Maroons have so many forms of healing. And I guess I'll just mention a quote in the book from

Chief Sterling. So Colonel Sterling, as he's also known of the Moortown Maroons, advised me, and it was probably a throwaway statement for him, but we were hiking on his property, which basically is this vertical incline. And I was feeling very nervous about where to step. He's in his 70s, but has a six pack and he was running up and down this hill. So

because we were trying to find this herb of, yeah, again, of indigenous healing that the Maroons have used as camouflage, but also for its medicinal purposes. And he said, you can't get lost out here. So those words really grounded me and made me realize that I had so much fear of the outdoors and fear of not knowing the right way to go or which step to take. Like, should I follow each step that he took?

But he just said, step from heel to toe and then just find your way. So he was holding my hand. But it was just a real moment of grounding that made me think about Western and continental philosophy and this

question of being lost maybe as actually a uniquely European one. And what if we were to take another approach to the map?

So I think a lot of Black geographers are asking these existential questions, and we should be led by Maroons, which you'll find these communities across the hemisphere, right? From Virginia to Brazil and the communities that you study and are in community with, and certainly in Jamaica and across the archipelago. So I do wonder what it would look like if

These folks were at the ICJ in The Hague. And I do wonder what it would look like if they were able to be at the climate policy table at COP.

the UN yearly conference on climate change, because I have to think that there would be alternative orientations to looking at this crisis because they've maintained sovereignty for centuries in Jamaica and across the Western hemisphere.

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Yeah. I really liked that part of the book and how you, um, that's really powerful to take us into the, you know, imagination, the environmental imagination of maroons. And I enjoyed that part of the book where you talked about, um, you said you had on your kind of welly boots and you were, uh, you know, as you said, trying to find your way and how he kind of stabilized you. Um, it's very, very powerful moment. Um,

And so I was also drawn to this chapter that you have on guano, and it's called Guano Destinies. And I guess this is a sort of sort of selfishly I was drawn to it because I taught introduction to Latin American studies last term. And I used a book that mentioned guano, just kind of mentioned it by name a little bit.

But your chapter goes into much more detail. And of course, guano is bird droppings and they're used to make fertilizer, I think, in European countries. But one can find guano like in Peru, for example, and I believe Jamaica. And so I wondered, what were the labor conditions of farming guano and why should we pay attention to these like labor protests of these workers? Yeah.

Thanks. I'm glad you were drawn to that part of the book because it's where the journey of the book proposal began. So with an academic journal article published in 2019 called Guano in Their Destiny, which really was a look at George Jackson's

thinking about his writing and rhetoric through climate and the car swirl in conversation with Ralph Waldo Emerson. So I kind of shift the lens for this chapter, Guano Destinies, the fifth chapter of the Book Dark Laboratory, to really just sit with our current moment. Again, sadly, in that Donald J. Trump has been reelected in 2018, I believe it was. He talked about

how Haiti was a shithole country along with African nations. And I've always just been fascinated by his connection between Haiti and Africa. But this question of refuse and refusal was one that rang loud for me to think about who has been refused by history, by history,

by the world who has been forcefully, I guess, tried to

who has been forgotten and who is living in the present under these conditions? So the question of cholera in Haiti comes up in this new reworking of the research on guano. And it really takes me back to transcendentalist thought in the 19th century and the incredible work of historian Nell Painter to look at Emerson's eugenicist rhetoric, to put it plainly.

So that undergirds the kind of philosophical stakes of the chapter. But you ask an important question about the material labor conditions of farming guano. And I wanted to make it clear that these were carcinogenic conditions, that there are epigenetic material realities when we think about what's inherited.

considering labor conditions and that these islands were so, I guess, full of the precious material, guano, which is bird droppings, especially from seabirds, but also from bats, because they were particularly arid. So people were forcibly often transported to these islands where there was no way to escape. And it's really telling that...

we saw rebellion in each case. So from Peru, which I write about where there were indentured Chinese laborers on the Chincha Islands off of the coast of Peru in the Pacific, to Hawaii, which I don't write as much about in the book, but I still wanted to record and think about those anti-colonial echoes of rebellion and refusal in that indigenous Pacific area.

refused to do this work, as well as was the case with African-American laborers who were brought there also in the 19th century to labor, and they uprose. They consistently were able to organize and to physically fight their labor

They're white overseers because it really did mirror the conditions of the plantation, which takes me to how I even got interested in guano, which was from James Bond, the world of Ian Fleming. He was actually a bird watcher.

and wrote the James Bond books, The Spy Thrillers in Jamaica, and actually on land that my family used to own. So it really was a journey to try to find guano and to find guano caves that led me on this journey. And this began, I think, in 2013.

So I've just been endlessly fascinated by bat shit and bird droppings and the different ritual possibilities of healing.

through this substance because many indigenous peoples across the hemisphere held it with ritual significance for different ceremonies, religious and cosmological ceremonies, but it's also been used in artwork in places like Puerto Rico. So there's a lot to think about in terms of

layers of bird droppings and bat droppings that tell us about the diet of these animals and how they have been a witness to the climate crisis. So I'll leave it there. But to think about

the spirituality of the substance, but also to think about what it meant to be forced under those conditions of being surrounded by guano and that it would really burn the ears and eyes of the laborers in the unrelenting heat and could lead to histoplasmosis and different fungal infections is to understand the kind of slow death

that these workers underwent such that it pushed them to take those pickaxes and shovels and really to wield them against their oppressors. So I find a lot of hope in that narrative regarding labor and the politics of struggle and refusal by the refused. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

yeah that was uh very well very well put um and so in in chapter three you also write about this logic of natural history museums and how they aim to catalog and to capture things i guess and so they you know they take

aspects of the natural world or objects from the natural world and, you know, catalog them and name them and put them up in these exhibitions for us, you know, for the public to come in to see. And that's a particular kind of like logic that, again, I think is I think you were pointing to it as being a colonial logic with the Natural History Museum.

But you also mentioned that your artwork and there are other activities in art museums that challenge this logic. And I wondered if you could talk about these kinds of projects, either your artwork or other actions that you see challenging this logic of the museum. Sure. Yeah, that chapter, chapter three on natural history museums was...

an interesting one to write because I begin with a quotation by Natalie Diaz. Let me see if I can flip to it in the book. She talks about being in lower Manhattan and that really did shape a lot of my founding of the Dark Laboratory.

because the pandemic began and I found myself breaking my lease in Ithaca and finding refuge in this neighborhood that as we both know is the home of the African Burial Ground which stretches even beyond what is the national park and monument and the layering of

colonial infrastructure so the custom house which is now the museum of the american indian is really significant downtown there and natalie diaz in her poem american arithmetic says i am doing my best not to become a museum of myself i'm doing my best to breathe in and out so she was

a keynote speaker in 2021 for the Summer Institute that we were lucky to be able to hold on cartographies of racial justice. And it's just been inspiring to think about an Indigenous perspective, to hear about her Native heritage,

homelands and her reservation and to think about what it means to become a tour guide or to resist that, to become a museum of oneself. So I've had many offers from museums, which I've been thankful for over the years, to produce activations or to curate installations, especially sound installations because of my practice as a DJ.

And I joke that I'm a PhDJ because I really see the classroom as a space of call and response. And I think that the best DJs are practicing a Black tradition of call and response and

So I've welcomed these invitations and opportunities from places like the Guggenheim, the Cooper Hewitt Museum, and we're in conversation ongoing to see what might come forth from that. The latest invitation has come from the Getty Research Institute in L.A. It will be delayed because of the tragic fires that...

have been taking place and exacerbated by the Santa Ana winds. But it just makes even more clear how these institutions are reckoning with climate crisis. And I think art institutions and archives like the Getty or Kuperhuber or the Guggenheim are sort of more able to face and reckon with these challenges based on their holdings as opposed to, let's say, the American Natural History Museum.

I kind of wonder if natural history museums and ethnology museums are just beyond any sort of redemption. And I posed that question in that chapter. But the Getty has been really inspiring, the conversations I've been having with curators, because their theme this past year that they invited me to install a sound piece about is extinction.

So they really are taking this view of climate very seriously. And then we have coming up next year where I'll be doing some work in residence with them, the theme of repair.

So I think these themes are evergreen when we consider the climate crisis, but I am really glad that I have these offers to bring in collaborators and to think about the work that has been taking place over the years and how we can...

yeah, get artists and different people paid to do this work and to make a statement that the university or the university museum or cultural institution might be able to

I guess, finance and bring an audience to that it wouldn't typically have. So there's a lot to say about complicity, considering these institutions, but that question has always been at the heart of Dark Laboratory when it started at Cornell. And I asked my students to think with me about this ecosystem that we find ourselves a part of as educators and students, because

there are these huge endowments and we are tied up in this web, but we should be thinking about how Fred Moten had described the university as an engine for settler colonialism. So that's an ongoing question that we ask in the lab. Yeah, thank you for that.

So in chapter one, taking us kind of back to the beginning of the book, you write about your grandfather and how he travels between Hong Kong and Jamaica. And this seemed like kind of an intimate history or a familial history, you know, that, you know, of someone from your background. And you include like a

family photographs and, you know, information passed down to you about him and your interactions as well. And I was wondering, what does it mean for you to turn to your family for this kind of intimate history and include it in the book?

Yeah, thank you for that question. It's a thorny one and it's one that I tried to navigate with a kind of ethical compass and care. I also have addressed it in another book that's just coming out now from University of Chicago Press called Scholars and Their Kin.

And it's a collected volume and my contribution is an essay called "Who Gave You Permission? Race, Colonialism, and Family Photography." So I thought deeply about whether or not to include an image of my grandfather, my maternal grandfather, in the book. But I decided ultimately that it would be an offering.

for the world and wherever the book is distributed to meet my grandfather and to see the questions that I have remaining about him because he's part of, I guess, what is known as the silent generation and part of a generation that I think didn't really

want to talk about trauma as we might, you know, more openly do in 2025. So I just, I just sit with the questions that arise from him really just having been born in Jamaica. So to a black Jamaican mother and to a Chinese father who was a shopkeeper in 1927. And I think about

the inheritance that my son will have, even though he'll never know my grandfather. And the picture I included is one of him and his cousin. And they're surrounded by these mountains, a mountainous backdrop of what I can assume is the new territories in Hong Kong. And it just made me think about the landscapes that we inherit.

It's typical to kind of maybe have portrait photography or studio portraiture, which I've also written quite a bit about in my career. But I wanted to sit with the background and the kind of vibrations of the geology of Hong Kong and to think about his Black boyhood there.

I've had the luxury to be able to travel to Hong Kong and across the border to Shenzhen, where our ancestral villages are. And it's really been an awakening, as I said in the book, because

Sadly, but maybe appropriately, the first time I ever was called the N-word was in Shanghai, so in China. And it just told me a lot of what I wondered about his childhood as a seven-year-old being transported from his native Jamaica, where his mother tongue would have been English or Patois. And...

to be transported across the Pacific to Hong Kong, another British colony. So to talk about his story was a call from my editor at Doubleday, Thomas, who asked me to think about the emotional questions. And...

I was not yet pregnant when I wrote the book, but I am glad now that I do have a descendant, as it were, to at least put these questions on the page. Some may think it's too speculative, but I think it's necessarily speculative when we think about the kind of regime of empiricism and what we've been told is objective about colonial histories and the matter that

Colonial histories are also always family histories, no matter if we're descended from the colonizer or the colonized or both, which is the case for a lot of us who are part of the African diaspora. So, yeah, I was happy to include that photograph, which to me poses a bit of a mystery. Like, did he swim through Africa?

you know, the waters of Kowloon? How did he think about the peninsula? What did it mean that bombs were dropping from the Japanese invasion from 1937, even before World War II? And how did he understand himself as other people?

in a cosmopolitan city, but clearly as someone who would have looked different than the majority of people who were Chinese. So I offer those questions as a way to think about the present and climate crisis when it comes to typhoons and different weather events that are increasingly taking place in Hong Kong, because our shared

planetary future and these rising sea levels are an island question. And I find that using family history allows me to imagine that rising sea level and what's to be done to secure a future for our descendants and our future kin, whether that's biological or not. Yeah.

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And so I wondered, too, so you just mentioned that you traveled to Hong Kong. And in a previous response, you talked about traveling to Jamaica and interacting with Maroons and their own environmental knowledge. And that takes me to the question of climate.

of your research for the book and how you went about kind of gathering all the information that you marshal in putting the book together. And so I wondered about anything you can tell us about the research, maybe the challenges and opportunities of doing it. I feel like I got to follow your journey a little bit,

on social media and seeing like some of your pictures that you would post either on Twitter or on Instagram about your different research travels. And so I saw that you were kind of traveling extensively. It seemed like you were participating with climate workers or environmental activists

people who care about the environment, interviewing people and talking with people. You did archival research and also some literary analysis as well. And so I wondered if you could talk about that aspect of the book. What can you tell us about the research for the project? Sure. Yeah, I think that social media is a bit of a dance. And I always wonder about

the ethics of what to share and what not to share, especially considering the extractive nature of the tourist economy. But yeah, there's a lot of footage that I have from different islands that I've been traveling to and I'm thinking about whether to

to share more extensively now that the book is out. So I'll touch on a journey that I took to Tahiti, which really was just life changing for me. And that was in 2023. And it just totally changed my orientation again to nature, similar to spending time with the Maroons in Portland, which happens to be where my other grandfather is from in Jamaica.

But a tour guide in Tahiti who is indigenous but also of Chinese descent, he said that he didn't want to know our names. There was like five of us on the tour that was going through the mountain jungles of the main island of Tahiti. He said that it was more important to him or could tell him more to know

two things, which were the name of the river where we get our water from, that body of water, and the river that we were born the closest to. So, yeah, that kind of revolutionized the way that I began to understand maybe a Pacific philosophy, a Polynesian philosophy of wayfinding and wayfaring, and

It turns out that there's quite a significant Chinese population in Tahiti. So there were similar questions that I was seeing in the Caribbean to do with sugarcane, the plantation economy, breadfruit, which is indigenous to Tahiti and was brought to Jamaica to feed enslaved Africans.

who were my ancestors and it kind of just felt interesting to be there as a tourist but also to be looking at the question of climate through this lens of inheritance and kind of seeing these people as cousins but also recognizing that Tahiti is part of France technically and that

Our colonizers, so the British in my case and the French in their case, are cousins. And they have a similar playbook of how to seize the land, how to steal territories and how to steal the labor and the lives of people. But they have never been quite successful in any of these locations. So it gave me a lot of hope and was an amazing way to

be critical of tourism, but also to think like, what if at Dark Lab we could make an island exchange program where we visit one another's islands? Because I've learned as much from Jamaica as I have from traveling to Trinidad and islands that I don't have a connection to in terms of my ancestry. So, yeah, it really has been

a journey of learning how to talk to hermit crabs from Indigenous Tahitian folks who were kind to show me the way to do that, to kind of sing to them like the sea and to see them emerge from their shells.

So I've just been thinking about ways to share that journey with a broader audience. So I'm glad that the book allows us to do that in a certain kind of way. It was also in Tahiti that I learned that in spite of what Shark Week shows us on the Discovery Channel, not all sharks need to be feared by humans.

And I don't even know how to swim, but I found myself trusting, again, indigenous Tahitian people who told me that I would be fine in the water because the coral reef is such a protector and the water is actually quite clean.

at a low level at a certain part of the reef that they carefully took us to. And it was just teeming with sharks and stingrays and they were very friendly. So I never imagined that would be me. But it was so healing because it really is the first time that I have ever attempted to swim in an ocean since I was 10. And I end the book with that story.

on Long Island and almost drowning as a 10-year-old. And the metaphor of the sandbar is one that is significant to me when we think about climate crisis and the ways in which we're kind of losing the ground that we thought was so stable under our feet and how that can shift suddenly. But I think it's both a cause for radical hope, but also to understand that

the land is not static, right? There's a shifting tide. There's also rip currents. There's the undertow that can pull you out to sea before you know it. And swimming against that is not always the solution, but sometimes going with it and swimming alongside of it can be the only way to save oneself. So I'm just thankful that

that I am here to tell the story because a lifeguard saved me, my sister and cousin. And we were all aged around 10 and there were no lifeguards on duty, but this guy was off duty, happened to be running by on the beach that was empty. And yeah,

I think about the kind of hope that we need to continue to have even until the last second, because I think that redemption is possible. Yeah. Yeah. That is you were talking about. That's that was terrifying when you're discussing the drowning. Oh, my goodness. And so the.

The book, it moves around between different times and spaces. And you really, and I kind of said this earlier, you marshal a

vast amount of information and different cases and different locations, as you just mentioned, Tahiti, Hong Kong, Jamaica, other islands, et cetera, like Peru with guano. You're really marshaling a vast amount of examples in the book.

And it doesn't seem to tell like a linear narrative of the climate crisis and the racial crisis. And that seems to be deliberate. And so I wondered, how did you think about structuring the book? And what were your intentions with storytelling?

Yeah, temporality is at the heart of this book and it felt like I needed to emphasize a non-linear temporality and to consider Yoruba temporality, to consider Hakka Chinese temporality, to think about

the time scales of guano in the Andes and to think about alternative cosmological ways of seeing time maybe as a spiral, but

but certainly not as a line. I think a lot of people, especially since the COVID pandemic, which is ongoing, have understood a kind of sense of disillusionment when it comes to this linear narrative of progress, liberal progress that we were supposed to be moving towards from Jim Crow to the civil rights era to...

wherever it is that we're supposed to be now. But the revenant of white supremacy that never really went anywhere really proves to us the kind of circularity of what needs to continue to be fought

And I think that comes down to a sense of political memory and certainly a political imagination in order to fight against fascism. So I knew that this book couldn't be told in a linear or chronological fashion. And I think that being rooted in Black Studies is

I felt a sense of a license to understand time on that scale, a scale of time which I've been thinking about as maybe one of black geological time.

and one that is syncopated with maestros like Sun Ra, but also maestros like W.E.B. Du Bois who announced the problem of the 20th century being that of the color line.

And these writings by Black thinkers can be seen as prophetic, but I think that we know better, which is that they were articulating the ongoing and current crisis that they were living through. So turning to another, I would say, maestro of this Black geological nonlinear time would be Octavia Butler and

People have really turned to her as someone who was prescient. But yeah, there's many of us who are Black feminists that want to disturb that notion because of this idea of Black people as being magical when we're actually just telling it like it is and the writing has been on the wall.

So my book will not please historians with a capital H who want a very linear timeline often, and it won't please them because of what they denounce as me-search. But I'm just really grateful, again, to my editors, both in the U.S. and the U.K.,

who encouraged me to set forth and to tell this story in the order that it needed to be told. So that's in the 19th century with the history of guano and the guano wars. It's also thinking about indigenous futures, Black futures and future sovereignty as a kind of horizon that can be reached. And it's also one that obviously,

takes us back to 1492 and even to 1493 where I identify Columbus

and the fact that he brought sugar cane, which is indigenous to India, to the Caribbean. And really, my argument is to say that the plantation economy of monocrop agriculture is responsible for the way that the soil has been exhausted. So in the 19th century, guano is transported to fix that soil erosion problem.

But again, it's through a kind of circuitry and theft of indigenous knowledge that came from peoples of the Andes. So I just have a lot of hope for the 21st century and 22nd century, if we're able to contend with how much of the scientific traditions of people of color have been discredited by the West.

Because then we would find ourselves with thousands of solutions and thousands of scientific methods. And we can step away from this notion that there's only one scientific method that I think we all learn in elementary school.

So there's nonlinear approaches that are necessary to solve the crisis. And it's a refrain for me in the book that the same science that got us into this problem with climate crisis and global warming is not going to be the same science to get us out of the problem. Yes. Yes, that makes me think of, you know, the master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house by, of course, Audre Lorde.

And I know that readers will really find the book to be so informative and thinking about everything that you've just talked about and then these different responses and solutions that have been, you know, existent in these communities for centuries.

And so my final question is, I guess, also kind of looking to your future and your future projects. And so now that Dark Laboratory is out in the world, what projects do you have coming up? What are you working on now or what do you have on the horizon?

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rest, but also think about where we're being called to next. And it was really exciting to announce a collaboration with Courtney Bryan, who's an incredible composer who was born in New Orleans, but like me has ancestry in Jamaica. So she's going to be the composer of a film that we're making together called Nine Night.

And it's really a climate requiem is how we're thinking about it. And as someone who, you know, is a DJ, I'm just really always thinking about sound first. So composing with her and learning from her process is going to be really incredible because we're both very archivally informed in our method.

So, yeah, it kind of brings us full circle to what I had mentioned about the three locations for the film being New Orleans, where she is from, Jamaica, where we both have family history, and then Long Island, where I've been able to learn quite a bit from her.

citizens of Shinnecock Nation. So we also welcomed this year Jeremy Dennis to the lab and he is really a wonderful photographer who is troubling the myths that Hollywood presents us about erasure, the way in which there's always a kind of haunting in movies like The Poltergeist about the

the native burial ground. And yeah, I feel just led on this path that takes me back to the genesis of Dark Laboratory, which was Toni Morrison's 1992 book of literary criticism called Playing in the Dark. And being able to take one of the last classes she offered as a student at Princeton, and

really set me on this journey because she taught through an atelier or workshop style of pedagogy derived from a French way of teaching and curating. And she curated at the Louvre. And I think I'm just so inspired by the kind of scope of what she was able to do, but always

unforgivingly and unapologetically talking to a Black audience with these universal questions. So it's really exciting to hold that as a horizon of storytelling, of which she was a master, but also to think about how this can be collaborative and how it can be Black feminist at its core.

you mentioned Audre Lorde and the master's tools and it's precisely that and it's precisely her who also inspires a lot of what we're doing at the lab because coming back to the quote from the maroon chief, Colonel Sterling, when he said, you cannot get lost out here. It reminded me of poetry is not a luxury and the way that she talked about the white father's

of continental philosophy and that she chose to actually spend more time thinking about the Black mothers. So if the White Fathers of the Enlightenment said, "I think therefore I am," she turns to the Black mothers and their tradition of saying, "I think or I feel and therefore I can be free."

So I'm paraphrasing that, but I think that there's just something about feeling and the radical way in which she encouraged readers to tune into something sensorially as a different kind of tool. I think people take the quote about the master's tools as a way of meaning that will be lost forever, but there are new tools to be invented to secure a future where there are people of color

And I'm excited to be any part of what I can encourage technologists, computer scientists, lawyers, really people from across different disciplines to be able to create these futurist Black and Indigenous technologies through technology.

the funding that I'm securing at the lab. So yeah, I'm just very optimistic in spite of what people are calling dark times because I see a lot of power in the dark and I don't see the dark as a negative thing. So I feel there's just a lot of profound hope in the future. And

Yeah, to be a mother now is part of that journey. And I'm just very excited to think about what's next and how we could possibly not choose to portray the future. Great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for being a light.

And we will look out for the film Nine Night: A Climate Requiem. And I also imagine that you're sitting there with your, again, largest commitment, right? That you're working with now as well, the dragon baby that you mentioned.

And so I want to thank you for sharing about Dark Laboratory with us. I'm Regan Gillum, and I've been speaking with Dr. Tao Lee Goff, who is the author of the book Dark Laboratory on Columbus, the Caribbean and the origins of the climate crisis published by Penguin Random House and Doubleday. Thank you so much for writing this book and thank you for sharing it with us on the podcast. Thank you. It's been an honor to be a guest on your show.

Thank you.