Writing.

DARK LABORATORY

(Doubleday, Hamish Hamilton - Penguin Random House, January 2025)

On Climate Crisis and the Racial Origins of Natural History

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.”

Academic Writing

BLACK CAPITAL, CHINESE DEBT (Under Contract, Duke University Press)

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 told through

1) food and fermentation politics

2) media history and commerce

3) the history of colonial photography

4) gambling practices and ghost rituals.

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.” Forming new politics, new cultures, new cuisines, new politics, and new theologies, these unruly acts were not always radical political movements. However, they were radical in the everyday and quotidian forms of defiance against European modes of life in the colonial-era Caribbean. Reggae formed as a soundtrack of defiance against colonial order powered by the friction of these grey economies. Beyond the colonial purview, Chinese gambling practices and Black and Asian ancestral veneration rituals formed informal debt economies. 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.