In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean to find an Edenic scene that has since been mythologized. Today on A Public Affair, host Ali Muldrow is in conversation with Tao Leigh Goffe who charts this mythology in her new book, Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis. She writes about the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the Caribbean islands for the benefit of European powers at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies.

Goffe bridges climate justice and racial justice in order to meet the demands of the present, from the pandemic and the Global Black Lives Matter movement to celebrity environmentalists buying private islands and the everyday complicity of owning an iPhone. She interrogates the colonial imagination that leads people to fantasize about island spaces as secretive, private, or grounds for experimentation. And she wants to turn away from notions of property and ownership, making the main characters in her book the Caribbean islands themselves, marijuana buds, mongooses, rocks, and more.

They also talk about who experiences the burden of climate change versus who is presented as environmental saviors, having reverence for land, plants, and animals, and the legacy of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark. Goffe’s next project picks up with the theme of maternity and breastfeeding in the context of resource extraction and racialization.

Tao Leigh Goffe is a London-born, Black British award-winning writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York. Her research explores Black diasporic intellectual histories, political, and ecological life. She studied English literature at Princeton University before pursuing a PhD at Yale University. She lives and works in Manhattan where she is currently an Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY. Dr. Goffe has held academic positions and fellowships at Leiden University in the Netherlands and Princeton University in New Jersey. She is the author of Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis.

Featured image of the cover of Dark Laboratory, available from Vintage.

The post The Music of Caribbean Witness appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.