Dark Laboratory

One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 History Books This Fall • One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025

“Groundbreaking.” —The Guardian

“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.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Dark Laboratory is stunning, brilliant and transformative. With a vast archive and a mighty pen, Tao Leigh Goffe tells the story of modernity and its discontents through the land, legacy, and people of the Caribbean. Upon reading this book, you will have a new understanding of the world.” —Imani Perry, National Book Award-winning author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“Ambitious….This is an urgent and frequently grim work, but it is also hopeful….And Goffe is relentlessly engaging, leaving the academy’s dusty archives, and traveling from Jamaica to Sardinia, Hong Kong to Hawai‘i, to discover better ways to live.” —The Atlantic

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

“Dark Laboratory takes readers by the hand and guides them from mountain tops to coral reefs, from Jamaica to China, from the story of one family to that of our planet, from the pasts that have made us to a future we can still imagine. At once expansive and intimate, Dark Laboratory is an ambitious, genre-busting book.” —Ada Ferrer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cuba: An American History

“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.” —Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces

“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.” —Jack E. Davis, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea

“Sweeping and sacred, Dark Laboratory stands as a singular text, leading readers through the dense layers of racial and colonial sedimentation that shape our present while radically reimagining a livable future on our rapidly warming planet.” —Ruha Benjamin, author of Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want

“Goffe invites us to see climate action as a decolonial projecto—one that requires transforming not only economies but also systems of knowledge, memory, and belonging.” —LSE Review of Books

“In this roving, erudite debut study, Goffe…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…scintillating…bursts with keen insights and connections.” —Publishers Weekly *starred review*

“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…A timely and provocative study.” —Kirkus Reviews

“[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.” –Shelf Awareness