Books
DARK LABORATORY
(Doubleday, Hamish Hamilton - Penguin Random House, January 2025)
On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis.
Deal of the Week: June 27, 2022
Goffe Finds “Eden” at Doubleday
Tao Leigh Goffe sold After Eden to Doubleday for six figures. Thomas Gebremedhin bought North American rights at auction, with Doubleday calling the title “a hemispheric investigation of the Caribbean as both an idyll in the Western imagination and as a dark laboratory of Western experimentation.” Goffe, a historian and assistant professor at Cornell, uses a mix of research and her own family history to, Doubleday went on, “radically transform how we conceive of race, natural history, colonialism, and the climate crisis.” Ian Bonaparte at Janklow & Nesbit sold the book, which is set for January 2025.
UK: The Bookseller’s Announcement
Hamish Hamilton swoops for Goffe's 'revelatory' work on racism and climate catastrophe
Hamish Hamilton has signed a “revelatory” work on the interconnected nature of racism and the climate catastrophe by Dr Tao Leigh Goffe.
Hannah Chukwu, editor, acquired UK and commonwealth rights to After Eden from Rebecca Carter at Janklow & Nesbit. US rights have been sold to Thomas Gebremedhin at Doubleday and the book will be published in January 2025.
After Eden focuses on the colonisation of the Caribbean and explores the way it has been viewed by the west as both an Eden-like paradise and as a dark laboratory for experimentation.
Chukwu said: “After Eden is a truly revelatory project. Uncovering the entangled nature of the climate crisis and racism crisis is ethically and politically vital. The cultural discourse has long been missing a book like this, and After Eden marks a significant breakthrough in the conversation. We are delighted to be publishing this book at Hamish Hamilton – Tao is a visionary, and I know that After Eden will be an unmissable work.”
BLACK CAPITAL, CHINESE DEBT (Duke University Press)
Forthcoming, 2026. On the Racial and Economic Origins of the Plantation Debt Crisis and Modern Capitalism (1806-Present).
At the crosscurrents of the Black Pacific and Asian Atlantic, this book brings material and archival culture into conversation with theories of race and diaspora that engage with Black studies, Asian American studies, and Caribbean studies to explore the asymmetric dynamic of ongoing colonialism in the Americas. It investigates the power of Afro-Asian intimacies, tensions, and alternative informal economies from the nineteenth century to the present.
The subject is the vibrant friction generated by Black, Chinese, and Indian people on and after the violent regime of the Caribbean plantation economics
The book tracks the everyday irreverence Black and Asian people in the Caribbean harbored towards the various European colonial authority. Together these subjects racialized by the plantation economy extracted “choice from conditions of choicelessness.” Spaces of sociality were underwritten by the power of Chinese debt and Black capital unexpectedly coming together unevenly. It celebrates the intergenerational spaces of leisure and play that developed beyond coloniality.
Book Chapters
in Edited Collections
Scholars and their Kin
(University of Chicago Press, Forthcoming 2024)
“Who Gave You Permission?: Race and Putative Colonial Histories”
- Tao Leigh Goffe
Interspecies Future: A Primer
(Distanz, 2024)
“Coralline Frequencies” - Tao Leigh Goffe
https://www.distanz.de/en/interspecies-future-a-primer
Can we depart from our human-centered perspective to build a future for the benefit of all species? What tools and techniques might help us get there? These are the questions investigated by the long-term interdisciplinary project Interspecies Future, which brings together perspectives from art, science, and technology to explore what this future might look like. First initiated in 2022 by LAS Art Foundation, this project explores new pathways for planetary thinking and collective intelligence. With more than 60 contributions, this interactive reader is the first book to provide an extensive foundation of key concepts, debates, and case studies that propose ways to re-frame, repair, and re-imagine interspecies relations. Interspecies Future: A Primer draws on recent advancements in planetary computation and machine learning, new discoveries in non-human intelligence, as well as post-human theory and Indigenous knowledge.
The publication offers both critical/concrete and abstract/imaginative propositions, including contributions by artists Tao Leigh Goffe, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Anicka Yi, Jenna Sutela, and Tomás Saraceno alongside texts from leading scientists like Karen Bakker , Dorion Sagan, and Kristin Andrews, as well as notable philosophers like Sue Donaldson, Tyson Yunkaporta, among others. The texts are brought to life through interactive augmented reality animations designed by Wang and Söderström, as well as video, audio, and 3D content from artists and scientists.
The Other Windrush: Legacies of Indenture in Britain’s Caribbean Empire (Pluto Press, 2021)
“Scratching the Surface: A Speculative Feminist Visual History of Other Windrush Itineraries” - Tao Leigh Goffe
“Family history is colonial history.”
Tao’s chapter from The Other Windrush was published in the gal-dem magazine
Black Food Cookbook
(Penguin Random House, 2021)
Recipe: Ackee and Callaloo Patties
Essay: The Poetics of Afro-Asian Cuisine
— Tao Leigh Goffe
Tao’s Recipe for Ackee and Callaloo Patties featured in Eater San Francisco.
On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence (De Gruyter, 2021)
“The Flesh of the Family Album: Black Pacific Visual Kinship”
- Tao Leigh Goffe
