Tao Leigh Goffe
Biographic Data
| ID | 101940 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tao Leigh Goffe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tao Leigh |
| FAMILY NAME | Goffe |
| SIGNATURE | GOFFE T L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5952-9038 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Radio Silence
Despite British colonial authorities' intentions, Black sound technologies and technologists flourished during World War II and the years following it. News radio was a colonial project with a civilizing mission that partly functioned through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and military radio technologies, but Afro-Caribbean presenters, producers, and audio engineers found other purposes. Afro-Jamaican BBC producer Una Marson looms lar…
Unraveling the Map: Conversations about Coalitional Solidarity and Worldbuilding
The World We Became: Map Quest 2350, A Speculative Atlas Beyond Climate Crisis
Tackling how racial justice and climate crisis are entangled, this essay introduces a speculative cartography experiment entitled The World We Became: Map Quest 2350 . A collaboration between a collective of artists, poets, academics, curators, architects, and activists, this digital humanities project maps global ecological crises and shared Black, Asian, Pacific, Middle Eastern, Latin American, Caribbean, and Indigenous futures. Intentionally p…
Stolen Life, Stolen Time
Working on the B-side of time, this essay considers the way Afro-futurism often configures time as nonlinear and entangled. In doing so, it looks at contemporary apocalyptic forms of storytelling, Watchmen, Parasite, Black Mother, Exit West, and On Such a Full Sea. The way the timeline of racial capitalism is represented in each reveals how blackness affects narrative time and historical time. In addition to the stolen land (dispossession of Nati…
The great experiment – the Trinidad experiment: Art, Abolition and Racial Indenture Across Archipelagoes
Scholar Tao Leigh Goffe, co-editor of the Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies , interviews mixed media visual artist Andrea Chung who is based in the United States. Connecting the histories of the Great Experiment of indenture in Mauritius and the Trinidad Experiment of Chinese indentureship in the Caribbean, the two discuss the history of labour exploitation and the abolition of racial slavery comparatively across oceans. Themes include th…
The Arts, Environmental Justice, and the Ecological Crisis
Chop suey surplus: Chinese food, sex, and the political economy of Afro-Asia
This essay traces the forgotten hemispheric Afro-Chinese political economy of race and desire in the Americas through chop suey as an analytic during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Post-abolition Asian indentured laborers occupied the colonial plantation, and so Chinese and Indian food was cooked and eaten in these spaces. Chop suey the Cantonese overseas dish, an amalgam of stir-fried vegetables and proteins, was adapted to local pa…
Bigger than the Sound
This essay examines the political economy of Caribbean cultural capital and the formation of reggae in Jamaica in the 1950s. Through study of the Afro-Asian intimacies and tensions embedded in the sound of preindependence Jamaica, the essay traces the birth of the "sound-system" to the networks of local small-retail grocery shops, ubiquitous across Jamaica, that were owned and operated by Jamaican Chinese shopkeepers and examines how they formed …
Sugarwork: The Gastropoetics of Afro-Asia After the Plantation
The politics and the poetics of sugar and its production have long connected African and Asian diasporas as the material legacy of the Caribbean plantation. This article considers the repurposing of sugar as art and the aesthetic of artists of Afro-Chinese descent, Andrea Chung and Mara Magdalena Campos-Pons. Part of a diasporic tradition of employing sugar as a medium that I call sugarwork , their artwork evokes the colonial entanglements of nut…
Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago
Guano in Their Destiny: Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture
To the ways fertilizer has been employed as an extended metaphor of racial extraction and mourning in U.S. and British literary thought by Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Jackson, and Ian Fleming, I juxtapose archival traces of racial indenture across the Americas that gesture to the exploitations of the nineteenth-century global guano trade. The phosphate-rich droppings of seabirds, guano is refuse that is embedded with a poetics of refusal. Assembl…
Wildlife of the Caribbean
Albums of Inclusion
This essay focuses on artwork that centers family photographs and home movies as a point of departure to trouble the conventional family album in order to narrate a story about Caribbean Chinese kinship. In the art examined, personal visual archives are used to respond to the lacuna of Caribbean Chinese familial intimacies from the colonial archive. Engaging shared themes of migration and racialized ideas of reproduction, three contemporary diasp…
Versus the Darker Races: The Black and Yellow Peril in Dr. No
Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal includes scholarship on the work of visual artists, commentary on current issues in Caribbean studies and travelogues. Anthurium remains committed to bridging the digital divide by making peer reviewed, scholarly articles and creative writing available to teachers, students, scholars and persons interested in Caribbean literature and culture worldwide without fee based subscriptions. We would like to thank t…
"Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture, "Spaces and Times of Occupation
Intimate Occupations: "The Afterlife of the "Coolie
The “coolie” occupied the European colonial imaginary as a racialized, laboring Asian body ripe for economic experimentation. But what of the interior life and the afterlife of this laborer? This article considers how two contemporary novels, Patricia Powell's The Pagoda and Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, occupy and queer the colonial archive by giving voice to “impossible subjects.” The Pagoda's protagonist Mr. Lowe escaped China as a young …
Guano in Their Destiny: Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture
To the ways fertilizer has been employed as an extended metaphor of racial extraction and mourning in U.S. and British literary thought by Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Jackson, and Ian Fleming, I juxtapose archival traces of racial indenture across the Americas that gesture to the exploitations of the nineteenth-century global guano trade. The phosphate-rich droppings of seabirds, guano is refuse that is embedded with a poetics of refusal. Assembl…
Bigger than the Sound
This essay examines the political economy of Caribbean cultural capital and the formation of reggae in Jamaica in the 1950s. Through study of the Afro-Asian intimacies and tensions embedded in the sound of preindependence Jamaica, the essay traces the birth of the "sound-system" to the networks of local small-retail grocery shops, ubiquitous across Jamaica, that were owned and operated by Jamaican Chinese shopkeepers and examines how they formed …
Stolen Life, Stolen Time
Working on the B-side of time, this essay considers the way Afro-futurism often configures time as nonlinear and entangled. In doing so, it looks at contemporary apocalyptic forms of storytelling, Watchmen, Parasite, Black Mother, Exit West, and On Such a Full Sea. The way the timeline of racial capitalism is represented in each reveals how blackness affects narrative time and historical time. In addition to the stolen land (dispossession of Nati…
Albums of Inclusion
This essay focuses on artwork that centers family photographs and home movies as a point of departure to trouble the conventional family album in order to narrate a story about Caribbean Chinese kinship. In the art examined, personal visual archives are used to respond to the lacuna of Caribbean Chinese familial intimacies from the colonial archive. Engaging shared themes of migration and racialized ideas of reproduction, three contemporary diasp…
Intimate Occupations: "The Afterlife of the "Coolie
The “coolie” occupied the European colonial imaginary as a racialized, laboring Asian body ripe for economic experimentation. But what of the interior life and the afterlife of this laborer? This article considers how two contemporary novels, Patricia Powell's The Pagoda and Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, occupy and queer the colonial archive by giving voice to “impossible subjects.” The Pagoda's protagonist Mr. Lowe escaped China as a young …
"Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture, "Spaces and Times of Occupation
Intimate Occupations: "The Afterlife of the "Coolie
The “coolie” occupied the European colonial imaginary as a racialized, laboring Asian body ripe for economic experimentation. But what of the interior life and the afterlife of this laborer? This article considers how two contemporary novels, Patricia Powell's The Pagoda and Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, occupy and queer the colonial archive by giving voice to “impossible subjects.” The Pagoda's protagonist Mr. Lowe escaped China as a young …
Versus the Darker Races: The Black and Yellow Peril in Dr. No
Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal includes scholarship on the work of visual artists, commentary on current issues in Caribbean studies and travelogues. Anthurium remains committed to bridging the digital divide by making peer reviewed, scholarly articles and creative writing available to teachers, students, scholars and persons interested in Caribbean literature and culture worldwide without fee based subscriptions. We would like to thank t…
Wildlife of the Caribbean
Albums of Inclusion
This essay focuses on artwork that centers family photographs and home movies as a point of departure to trouble the conventional family album in order to narrate a story about Caribbean Chinese kinship. In the art examined, personal visual archives are used to respond to the lacuna of Caribbean Chinese familial intimacies from the colonial archive. Engaging shared themes of migration and racialized ideas of reproduction, three contemporary diasp…
Sugarwork: The Gastropoetics of Afro-Asia After the Plantation
The politics and the poetics of sugar and its production have long connected African and Asian diasporas as the material legacy of the Caribbean plantation. This article considers the repurposing of sugar as art and the aesthetic of artists of Afro-Chinese descent, Andrea Chung and Mara Magdalena Campos-Pons. Part of a diasporic tradition of employing sugar as a medium that I call sugarwork , their artwork evokes the colonial entanglements of nut…
Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago
Guano in Their Destiny: Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture
To the ways fertilizer has been employed as an extended metaphor of racial extraction and mourning in U.S. and British literary thought by Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Jackson, and Ian Fleming, I juxtapose archival traces of racial indenture across the Americas that gesture to the exploitations of the nineteenth-century global guano trade. The phosphate-rich droppings of seabirds, guano is refuse that is embedded with a poetics of refusal. Assembl…
The Arts, Environmental Justice, and the Ecological Crisis
Chop suey surplus: Chinese food, sex, and the political economy of Afro-Asia
This essay traces the forgotten hemispheric Afro-Chinese political economy of race and desire in the Americas through chop suey as an analytic during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Post-abolition Asian indentured laborers occupied the colonial plantation, and so Chinese and Indian food was cooked and eaten in these spaces. Chop suey the Cantonese overseas dish, an amalgam of stir-fried vegetables and proteins, was adapted to local pa…
Bigger than the Sound
This essay examines the political economy of Caribbean cultural capital and the formation of reggae in Jamaica in the 1950s. Through study of the Afro-Asian intimacies and tensions embedded in the sound of preindependence Jamaica, the essay traces the birth of the "sound-system" to the networks of local small-retail grocery shops, ubiquitous across Jamaica, that were owned and operated by Jamaican Chinese shopkeepers and examines how they formed …
The great experiment – the Trinidad experiment: Art, Abolition and Racial Indenture Across Archipelagoes
Scholar Tao Leigh Goffe, co-editor of the Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies , interviews mixed media visual artist Andrea Chung who is based in the United States. Connecting the histories of the Great Experiment of indenture in Mauritius and the Trinidad Experiment of Chinese indentureship in the Caribbean, the two discuss the history of labour exploitation and the abolition of racial slavery comparatively across oceans. Themes include th…
The World We Became: Map Quest 2350, A Speculative Atlas Beyond Climate Crisis
Tackling how racial justice and climate crisis are entangled, this essay introduces a speculative cartography experiment entitled The World We Became: Map Quest 2350 . A collaboration between a collective of artists, poets, academics, curators, architects, and activists, this digital humanities project maps global ecological crises and shared Black, Asian, Pacific, Middle Eastern, Latin American, Caribbean, and Indigenous futures. Intentionally p…
Stolen Life, Stolen Time
Working on the B-side of time, this essay considers the way Afro-futurism often configures time as nonlinear and entangled. In doing so, it looks at contemporary apocalyptic forms of storytelling, Watchmen, Parasite, Black Mother, Exit West, and On Such a Full Sea. The way the timeline of racial capitalism is represented in each reveals how blackness affects narrative time and historical time. In addition to the stolen land (dispossession of Nati…
Unraveling the Map: Conversations about Coalitional Solidarity and Worldbuilding
Radio Silence
Despite British colonial authorities' intentions, Black sound technologies and technologists flourished during World War II and the years following it. News radio was a colonial project with a civilizing mission that partly functioned through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and military radio technologies, but Afro-Caribbean presenters, producers, and audio engineers found other purposes. Afro-Jamaican BBC producer Una Marson looms lar…
History (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Art (7 works) · Archaeology (6 works) · Colonialism (6 works) · History (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Caribbean history, culture, and politics (5 works)