Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis

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. (Jan.)