MAY 8 | 6:30pm at McNally Jackson Seaport
Dark Waters, Deep Time: Climate and What Manhattan’s Seaport Remembers
with Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe
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I'd just like a seat, please - $5
I'd like the book and a seat - $35.00
New York City is made up of over 40 islands. By looking to Manhattan’s seaport and its deep history of commerce and cultural exchange, professor and D.J. Tao Leigh Goffe explores how climate change has long impacted New York’s deep shorelines. Toni Morrison has written that “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” What do New York’s rivers remember? Sharing insights from her climate research lab, Dr. Goffe will draw on Black, Asian, Indigenous, and European histories to answer this question. From Lenapehoking to Chinatown to Dutch New Amsterdam to the site of the Auction Block of chattel slavery, what has the harbor and its ecologies witnessed? Looking to literature from Toni Morrison to Herman Melville, she will prompt the audience to ask an emotional question about NYC and the climate crisis.
Tao Leigh Goffe is a London-born, Black British award-winning writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York. Her research explores Black diasporic intellectual histories, political, and ecological life. She is a member of NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art and technology in New York City. She studied English literature at Princeton University before pursuing a PhD at Yale University and is currently an Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY. Dr. Goffe has held academic positions and fellowships at Leiden University in the Netherlands and Princeton University in New Jersey. Her writing has been published in or is forthcoming from peer-reviewed academic and more public-oriented journals including South Atlantic Quarterly, Small Axe, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Vulture, and Boston Review.