There Is No Laboratory… and No Coherent Research

An “investigation of the Caribbean as both an idyll in the American imagination and a dark laboratory of Western experimentation, revealing secrets to racial and environmental progress that impact how we live today. In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse… The forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands’ bounty—including guano, which, at the time, was more valuable than gold—for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies. Braiding together family history, cultural reportage, and social studies, Goffe radically transforms how we conceive of Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis; and, in doing so, she deftly dismantles the many layers of entrenched imperialist thinking that shroud our established understanding of the human and environmental conditions to reveal the cause and effect of a global catastrophe…”
The blurb is confusing for many reasons. For example, the first time the question “What Is the Dark Laboratory?” is addressed is at the end of the second chapter. The title should have been explained within the blurb. The first paragraph in this section offers abstract concepts that don’t really explain anything, instead offering postmodern nonsense. Then, she explains that the idea developed during her PhD studies, which had no lab-work, and yet she describes her research as being done “in the lab”. “At Dark Lab, we encourage models of research for reckoning with stolen land and life…” This is far into this book, not in an introduction. She should be saying something concrete and researched. There is no “Dark Lab”: it’s a fictional place she is using symbolically. Instead of these generalities, she could be actually describing how land and life were stolen. And this book merely applies postmodern nonsense-philosophy to “conceive Blackness”, instead making any serious “radically” transforming discoveries in this direction. For example: “Blackness is best described, to paraphrase Tony Morrison in Sula, as inventing ‘choice out of choicelessness’” (96). A “paraphrase” is a summary, which should not be put in quotation marks, so the author does not understand this term before applying it. And this general note is followed by the claim that “Black people” were “living… multiple… lines of apocalypse…” (96-7). Why this over-dramatization, instead of just describing what they were experiencing, and then commenting (if one most) on how awful it was. Then, she imagines a future when the “Mediterranean Sea will become the Mediterranean Mountain Range” and Europeans might migrate to Africa as climate refugees. I address these types of fantasy in a novel I recently wrote, but what does any of this have to do with realities in the past?
Later in the book, the problem of “invasive” species is addressed by questioning the term “native”. Instead of presenting any scientific solutions that might be better than post ones this paragraph concludes with: “It stands to reason that a colonial solution would be proposed by those who introduced a colonial problem by playing God” (227). Who played God? What does it have to do with invasive species?
This book is a bunch of nonsense. These types of books seem to be deliberately written in a nonsensical fashion to suppress the necessary arguments about the environment and racism that should be at the forefront. These can only change minds if they are handled with rational clarity, and not with this sort of digressive nonsense-making.
—Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Fall 2024: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-fall-2024

This is an oustanding book. It focuses more on the Anglophone Caribbean like most books do, so it misses an opportunity to comment on years prior to the arrival of the British, but instead, the pivot to Chinese Caribbean relations is a much needed critique and commentary. I know this book will be essential reading for those in various fields and really anyone who wants critical perspectives on what is happening in our world. Truly a neat contribution to letters, knowledge, and ontology.

reviewed after assignment for the web newsletter Shelf Awareness. review can be found in full at https://www.shelf-awareness.com/