Dark Laboratory Book Event, University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland.

Tables of Contents creates unique and delicious gatherings and conversations at the intersections of food, literature, arts, and culture. Founded by chef Evan Hanczor in 2012 with a dinner inspired by The Sun Also Rises, Tables of Contents has grown to collaborate with over 250 leading contemporary writers, musicians, and artists at the intersections of food and creativity, including National Book Award & Pulitzer Prize winners, MacArthur recipients, and literal rock stars. Our curation highlights voices and perspectives that have often been under-considered and the individuals who are building our contemporary canon.

Terrance Hayes is the author of How to Be Drawn, a National Book Award finalist, and Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are Wind In a Box, Hip Logic, and Muscular Music. His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a United States Artists Zell Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Tao Leigh Goffe is a London-born, award-winning Black British writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York. For the past fifteen years she has worked as an academic and has been invited to give keynote lectures in her specialities of colonial histories of race, geology, climate, and media technologies. Her second book Black Capital, Chinese Debt, presents a long history of racialization, modern finance, and indebtedness. It brings together subjects of the Atlantic and Pacific markets from 1806 to the present under European colonialism.

Adam Haslett is the author of Imagine Me Gone, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award; You Are Not a Stranger Here, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Union Atlantic, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. His books have been translated into thirty languages, and his journalism on culture and politics have appeared in The Financial Times, Esquire, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Nation, and The Atlantic, among others. He currently directs the MFA Program at Hunter College.

Each ticket includes three small dishes inspired by the passages, and one complimentary drink. Additional drinks will be available for purchase. Our friends Sammi and Olivia of Cocktails in Color will be mixing up cocktails inspired by the book, so you'll want to make room for a couple! And the good folks at Books Are Magic will be with us selling books, so come ready to pick up a few copies!

https://tablesofcontents.substack.com/p/tables-of-contents-february-11th

https://thethirdplace.is/event/toc-reading-series-hayes-goffe-haslett-1

Dark Laboratory Book Event in conversation with Dr. Kaete O’Connell, Grand Strategy, Jackson School, Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and Whitney Humanities Center will co-host a discussion with Tao Leigh Goffe on her new book, “Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis.” She will be in conversation with Kaete O’Connell, assistant director of the Grand Strategy program.

In her book, Goffe charts the forces that have shaped the Caribbean islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands’ bounty for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies. Braiding together family history, cultural reportage and social studies, she radically transforms how we conceive Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis. Through the lens of the Caribbean — both guide and warning of the man-made disasters that continue to plague our world — Goffe closely situates the origins of racism and climate catastrophe within a colonial context.

Goffe is a London-born, Black British award-winning writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York. She is currently an associate professor at Hunter College and founder and executive director of Dark Laboratory, a humanities lab centered on race, technology, and climate. Her research explores Black diasporic intellectual histories, and political and ecological life. Goffe studied English literature at Princeton University before pursuing a PhD at Yale University.

The event is open to the Yale community. Registration is required.

https://jackson.yale.edu/jackson-events/dark-laboratory-a-conversation-with-tao-leigh-goffe/

Tao Leigh Goffe presents Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis, with Natalie Diaz

A groundbreaking 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.

“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

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. In Dark Laboratory, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart 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.

https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/event/01212025_Seaport

SOLD OUT

In conjunction with Alex Callender's exhibition night grass @island83gallery and @darklaboratory join each other for an artist talk between Tao Leigh Goffe and Alex Callender. @taoleighgoffe is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and associate professor at Hunter College, joining Callender to discuss the exhibition as well as overlapping subjects and processes between their respective work. Their discussion will feature topics of working with archival fragments, issues of ecology, and ideas surrounding ‘haunting’, the relationship between our present and the past. Goffe is also founder of Dark Lab, a research and tech collective, and will be releasing her new book, Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis, this coming January. Please register via eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/night-grass-exhibition-talk-with-alex-callender-and-tao-leigh-goffe-tickets-1083481946669?aff=oddtdtcreator

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/night-grass-exhibition-talk-with-alex-callender-and-tao-leigh-goffe-tickets-1083481946669?aff=oddtdtcreator

The Centre for Experimental Practices presents “Lines of Flight: The New Laboratories” at the University of Huddersfield.

Featuring Dark Lab Executive Director and Founder Tao Leigh Goffe.

Free and open to the public.

Eventbrite link tba.

May 18, 12:00-2:2:30, Gerry Clubhouse 321 E. 111th Street, New York, NY, 10029.

Join the artists Tao Leigh Goffe and Cecile Chong in collaboration with the Boys Club of New York for a community day poster-making workshop for teenagers combining eco-art collage and hip hop graphic design.

Email darklaboratory2020@gmail.com to sign up. Space is limited.

Registration required and free.

Lunch provided.

For this Meet the Artist conversation, exhibiting artist Tao Leigh Goffe has invited author Maaza Mengiste and artist, writer and editor Kandis Williams to join her to discuss the ideas that have shaped her Sunroom Project Space exhibition Plot and Provision: Crate-Digging. Goffe’s site-specific project is a climate-art, multimedia installation that explores intergenerational healing through the sounds and the soil of the Bronx. Central to the exhibition is the act of digging; sifting through history, archives, soil, and the origins of hip hop music to highlight the social, economic, and political realities that permeate our contemporary moment. Goffe’s exhibition complements the penultimate chapter of her forthcoming book After Eden (Doubleday).

This program is co-sponsored by Dark Laboratory, a creative technology organization that researches climate and race through Black and Indigenous theory and action.

Meet the Artist is an ongoing series of conversations between exhibiting artists and the curatorial team, and sometimes invited guests, at Wave Hill. This program provides an opportunity for Wave Hill visitors, the artist’s community, and others to learn more about an artist’s creative process and the themes within their work.

Glyndor Gallery is wheelchair-accessible. There is an accessible, ground-level entrance at the front of the building with an elevator that provides access to the gallery level. The Sunroom Project Space can be accessed with an ADA-compliant ramp. The restroom on the gallery level is all-gender and ADA-compliant.

Event Page Link

Admission free with registration. Email darklaboratory2020@gmail.com for code.

In this co-sponsored event Dark Laboratory co-founder Tao Leigh Goffe will moderate a conversation on the film Landfall that looks at Puerto Rico beyond Hurricane María.

Director of Black Mother (2018), @criterioncollection film, Khalik Allah will lead a virtual masterclass on method, Black diaspora, camera techniques, and metropolitan representation in Prof. Tao Leigh Goffe’s Cornell University grad seminar @cornellaap “Black and Indigenous Metropolitan Ecologies”
By May 4th, to apply send a paragraph of intent addressed to Khalik Allah explaining your interest in his work and the ethos of the Dark Laboratory + cv to DarkLaboratory2020@gmail.com. All are welcome to apply!

Join the Dark Laboratory for a celebration and virtual gallery debut of photographers who are the winners of the inaugural Dark Laboratory Photo Essay Prize. Ranging from portraiture to landscape, each work touches on the intersections of Black and Indigenous life across the Western hemisphere. Curators, jurors, and prize winners will speak about the artwork and essays to honor how our ecological futures depend on reckoning with the crossroads of Black and Native life.

Free and Open to the Public.

Zoom Link for RSVP.

Yale professor Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) will lead a virtual masterclass on archiving Indigenous art and archives from his experience with the recent exhibition Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art, the culmination of three years of work by Yale University student curators—Katherine Nova McCleary (Little Shell Chippewa-Cree) ’18; Leah Tamar Shrestinian, ’18; and Joseph Zordan (Bad River Ojbiwe) ’19.

To apply send a paragraph of intent addressed to Professor Blackhawk explaining your interest in curating Black and or Indigenous archives and art and a cv to DarkLaboratory2020@gmail.com.

The Dark Laboratory is honored to co-sponsor an invited Cornell University virtual performance by Indigenous performance artist Ty Defoe, organized by Professor Sara Warner (PMA).

Events details to be announced.

Our co-founder Tao Leigh Goffe will participate in a webinar organized through a partnership with the Society of Black Archaeologists, Indigenous Archaeology Collective, Cornell Institute of Archaeology & Material Studies, SAPIENS, The Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Moderator:  Ayana Flewellen, PhD, co-founder of Society of Black Archaeologists, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC-Riverside

 Tao Leigh Goffe, PhD, co-founder of Dark Laboratory, assistant professor of literary theory and cultural history

Mohamed Ali, PhD, founder of AMSARC (American Sudanese Archaeological Research Center), Assistant Professor in the Department of Archaeology at International University of Africa in Khartoum, Sudan.  

 Keolu Fox, PhD, (Kānaka Maoli) founder of the Indigenous Futures Institute, Assistant professor at University of California, San Diego.

Rae Gould, PhD, (Nipmuc) Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative,  Brown University

Grace Dillon, PhD , (Anishinaabe) professor in the Indigenous Nations Studies program at Portland State University