Tao Leigh Goffe, Assistant Professor in the Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies departments at Cornell, is my favorite Twitter mutual. When I read her 2019 article in Amerasia Journal, ‘“Guano in their destiny”: race, geology, and a philosophy of indenture’, my first reaction was, You’re allowed to do this? The piece—about the 19th century multimillion-dollar industry of seagull droppings used as fuel and the 100,000 indentured Chinese laborers in Peru who mined it—considers how we might imagine our relationship to land, past and present. This article is just one example of her important transdisciplinary work on Afro-Asian entanglements in the Caribbean.

Sino, Black British, Jamaican, and American, Goffe works with the living legacies of Black feminism to ask what it means not only to look and to read, but to really listen. I caught up with Goffe in April over Zoom to talk about diaspora as disruption and learning as living. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jiaqi Kang: What made you decide to become a researcher?

Tao Leigh Goffe: Research for me is not a choice: it’s a calling, a vocation. I’ve always not been satisfied with a one-word answer to anything, so research for me seems to be a verb and a way of life. An ongoing project. For me, it's also about unfinished business, and that is the business of Afro-Asia: as a political project, but also Afro-Asian intimacies and intersections. I don't see it as a choice. It’s who I am, but also, it’s a question that I kind of want the answer to.

JK: The type of histories that we try to uncover are so deeply personal and political, it becomes something that you're constantly searching for. I've been thinking how Saidiya Hartman or Allan Sekula say the archive is violent, and we need to create some kind of fiction to some extent in order to uncover the past that we want to understand. How would you relate that to the concept of ‘chop suey’ that you discuss in your 2020 article ‘Chop Suey Surplus: Chinese food, sex, and the political economy of Afro-Asia’?

TLG: I think my research has always taken a stance in learning from what it means to be against recovery. I'm not interested in recovering anything because of the epistemic violence that often takes place in the act of becoming some sort of savior, to save these figures from oblivion. More and more, I think about Afro-Asian presence as deep. We have existed, we don't need to ‘prove’ that to some sort of white gaze. We also don't need to recover all of these people––African and Asian or both––from the past… We don't have their consent. They are long dead, and we find traces of them in the colonial archive.

Rather I think that the fiction is really critical, as you’re gesturing to with Hartman. We have to sit with the uncertainty of understanding, of knowing their lives, and think about why it is that history always has to be this act of recovery. That’s a long way to talk about ‘chop suey’ as this woman, this figure… who resembles me, who is Afro-Chinese, that I've seen again and again through various forms of colonial and other archives. I think that eating the dish chop suey suggests something of why it is that people are always searching for authenticity, and are always searching for Chineseness without actually defining that term, as an English word. For me, it’s just about opening up more questions and the speculative being a resource, really being led by people like Hartman and Hortense Spillers, [who] gives us this conundrum of the girl-child that is the bastard. We know about Heathcliff: it’s always the boy-child that is the bastard, but what about the girl? What does she stand to inherit, and why doesn’t she matter? For me chop suey was an answer or a figure to add to that lineage.

JK: Nothing is fact. There’s so much power in recognising that… It is about the community and the dialogue that is forged through the process.

TLG: I just don't trust people who are so obsessed with truth, capital T, and fixity. Because it does not exist in the way they want it to.

JK: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the history of the Sino diaspora as being the history of capitalism. The history of indenture was exporting labor and now a lot of the cheap labor has gone back into China’s borders. A lot of immigration in recent decades is very different class-wise, compared to the 19th century. Where do we go from here? In this 21st century neoliberal globalised atmosphere, is diaspora as a word still relevant?

TLG: I’m constantly trying to interrogate etymologies that can give us some clues as to how to describe China as a concept, and also Chineseness. The resonance of ‘overseas Chinese’ is really critical––and the characters for how one says that, and when we see that term emerging––is something that I would be interested in tracing alongside your claim about capitalism.

In the book that I’m writing right now, Black Capital, Chinese Debt, [I seek] to understand this process of diaspora. We have to look to the etymology of diaspora as a word linked to a Jewish sense of being nomadic, or there being many tribes; a kind of… lostness that’s about a journey over deep time. I think we have to ask ourselves, ‘Does that translate to China or not?’ And the way that I’m answering it is in the specificity of Hakka culture and identity. What that means; and the flattening of difference that takes place, on the part of people who are Hakka as well as people who are not. I feel like I have enough distance as someone who is Hakka, but also who doesn’t just accept what Hakka people say to be true, to be able to interrogate these myths about Hakka origin.

What does it mean to be indigenous within China? What does it mean to think about centuries of migration supposedly from the north to the south? What does it mean for your name to be literally formerly a slur that means ‘guest dwellers’? What about these centuries of fighting in Guangdong as a whole––but also thinking about Hong Kong as a port city. On whose terms is this taking place? It’s very clear who has a birthright to the land and who is given different parcels: Hong Kong… and that was something that I learned in terms of my grandfather’s house where he grew up in Hong Kong, that it was this cross-border migration that took place in the late 1800s. I was able to find our original ancestral village in Shenzhen. What does it mean for Hakka people to be a minority, but also to make this claim to Han Chineseness that always has to be continually made and signed off on?

So that's where I’m sitting in terms of this question of capital as well, why nomadism and not being fixed in terms of settlement represents such a threat to capitalism.

JK: I didn’t know you were Hakka; that's really cool. It’s such a critical lens because it complicates everything we think we know about what it means to be cross-cultural, to be Sino in any way.

TLG: Basically all Jamaican Chinese are Hakka. Not in Trinidad or Guyana, but for some reason that’s the majority Jamaican case.

JK: Nationalism is still so big… It’s so hard for people to imagine a world without borders. I personally identify so much more as just being diasporic––being in solidarity with other people who are diasporic––over any other identity.

TLG: So do I. If you don't have that sensibility… I don't think they can understand. [Laughs]

JK: In your story about meeting your grandfather’s family in China, it’s the family photograph that really mediated that encounter when everything else is difficult to communicate. It made me think about Tina Campt’s idea of listening to or feeling the vibrations of images, in order to have a more holistic, nuanced, compassionate understanding of history. What does it mean to read and to look?

TLG: The texture of photography is something that I've been encouraged to think about through [Tina Campt’s] work and mentorship over the years. I discovered that she had been a DJ earlier in her life, and also Hortense Spillers had been a DJ. Having this relationship to music, to channelling, to knowing what it means to sustain an audience; and for that to be a participatory act––what Paul Gilroy calls an antiphonal act, a call and response––is really important to Black diasporic poetics. He describes a kind of politics of transfiguration in terms of what the Black Atlantic means. I think it’s actually specific to the Black Atlantic in the way that Gilroy describes it––not as a physical location but perhaps as ‘diaspora’ in the way that you were talking about.

That comes out of understanding this question of presence. Paul Gilroy, who is Black British, [is] making claims about that history, but also about a kind of… not having been heard, in terms of the Afropean experience. I certainly feel that as a Black British person who does not sound British and has grown up in the U.S. with people who cannot understand how I could be British. It’s sort of attuned to you as an immigrant: listening––a sense of deep listening, which I encourage my students to do with me, as opposed to and in opposition to close reading. It has to be a full body, sensorial experience. So I think that we have to look, listen, feel, touch… I don't want to say taste, but food is also important here!

There’s so much to understand in terms of the materiality of our family albums, because many people have family albums, photograph albums––and even if they don't, there's something that we can try to understand, in terms of a personal archive and where we try to place ourselves within history.

JK: In undergrad, I was really into phenomenological art, being like, ‘Oh yeah, this art is about the full experience.’ Increasingly, I'm thinking about scholarship as being from that perspective as well. Now I can't stop writing in the first person.

I love the term you use, PhDJ. During COVID you haven't had a lot of opportunities to create that kind of social space, but could you expand a bit more on your artistic process? I’ve seen you use the word remix in an academic context, which touches on some of your research interests: things coming together. As someone who has so many different ways in which you practice, do you feel that there is rigidity in academic spaces in terms of the way that you work and the way that you study?

TLG: I see American Ivy League universities as Abercrombie and Fitch––it’s distressed-looking clothes to emulate a WASP experience that was just created yesterday. Europe laughs at the U.S. for being so young, but they also have to balk in terms of U.S. power: the power of U.S. universities and what they are able to say is knowledge as a fixed structure.

I do see my DJing as intimately involved in trying to disturb that peace, through Black music in particular. But also just through doing what I want to do! Which is to celebrate this cultural heritage from the Caribbean: of dance hall, of soca, of reggae; of a kind of resilience after colonialism that really just sees European colonialism as irrelevant. When I talk about the remix, [it’s] in a very specific Jamaican sense of what they call versions. I’m versioning. It’s really important in terms of sampling, but it’s a disregard of intellectual property in a sense but also irreverence for it. That is so totally other than U.S. copyright law. For me it’s really important to think about DJing not as just fun background music at a party, but as a radical method of asserting oneself and being otherwise. It’s about friction, it’s about the dancefloor, the nightclub––it’s all of these things that we’re missing right now in terms of sociality. It’s fun!

JK: Could you tell us about Dark Laboratory? It sits at the intersections of scholarship, creative work, and community building.

TLG: I am very excited by how it’s really flourished. It started as a dream… really centered in me thinking about the Caribbean as a kind of dark laboratory, a space of experimentation, a space of playing in the dark, to use Toni Morrison’s phrase. I’m thinking about that crossroads of Black and Indigenous relationality. Being able to forge something outside of coloniality. At the periphery of the plantation, within hills and mountain spaces, within swamps––they were able to survive. There are shared bloodlines there, but there’s also shared gastronomy that I’m interested in. The Dark Laboratory is a platform to center activists, artists, theorists who are doing that work.

I realised [that] in order to do work on Afro-Asian intimacies, there was temporally a deeper question to ask, as neither African nor Asian people are native to the western hemisphere. It felt for me like responsibility, especially as an immigrant, to think about whose lands these are. I live right at Wall Street and I just think about what it means that these are [and continue to be] Lenape homelands, and why it is that so many feel like they don't need to acknowledge that. It’s a really interesting intellectual question.

JK: My Master’s thesis is about Japanese American internment from a politically ecocritical perspective. It’s just really interesting that, at the time, Japanese Americans were so notorious for their agricultural success on the West Coast; after they were moved to these camps, they were expected to continue farming there, that being part of their patriotic effort. Some of the camps were co-operated by Indigenous tribes on that land––there is so much, in terms of entanglements.

TLG: It's important to question U.S.-centrism. I only became a citizen maybe five years ago. Why it is that we’re even speaking English? Iyko Day has done a lot of this work, to look at questions of what they might call Asian settler colonialism. It also depends on who wants to learn from who, and what is considered cultivation versus what is considered extraction. But I wanted to share this with you if you haven't heard of it: ‘Out of the Desert’ [a public humanities project on Japanese American internment]. I always learned so much from Courtney Sato’s work on how you might not find the answer that you want.

JK: So much that we find is silence: silence as resistance. Silence isn't always something that’s necessarily bad, it can be quite empowering: refusal, which is something that I’m really getting into. I'm thinking a lot about how archives can be constructed from the side of people who are marginalised. I wanna rethink the citizenship narrative.

TLG: That's what I learned from Courtney as well: a lot of people say ‘Japanese internment’ and that’s really offensive to Japanese Americans for whom the whole point is citizenship [to leave out the ‘American’]. But what does it mean to make claims about citizenship, when citizenship is violent?

JK: I want to ask about your cooking journey; the pictures on Twitter all look delicious. You’ve been doing events on Afro-Asian cuisine with Lucas Sin whom we featured in sinθ #7 "MUD 泥”, and you’ve written about gastropoetics. In teaching, you have students create recipes or videos. Can you tell us about your cooking journey and also your pedagogical ethos?

TLG: I can talk about a class I've been teaching for about five years now. It started out as being called ‘The Darker Nations: Afro-Asian Culture’. That’s when I taught it at NYU. When I got this job at Cornell, I decided to change the name of the course but to keep the content the same. It became ‘Afro-Asia: Food, Futurism, Feminism’. It was primarily because I realised, in terms of this class, that most of my students did not identify as men, or in binary senses of gendered being, and it felt significant to me that people found each other in this class, became really great friends. People mainly of African or Asian background, Latinx people.

There’s always one or two straight white men who felt like minorities and sometimes would voice that. For those white men to feel like a minority for the first time, I think that was important for them. It wasn't about them: they’re welcome to learn, but it was just really great to be able to have this space where people were open to exploring all of this—and that feminism was actually the key. Women of color feminisms; international solidarity––[that] was the vocabulary that students were searching for, were building themselves, and were excited to learn about [in] these archives and [to learn] the fact that it had happened before. Third World is not a dirty word, as many of my students assume––it’s actually really powerful.

My pedagogy has always been based in listening to students; also, coming from a kind of Black British sensibility about what cultural studies is, working groups are critical to my pedagogy, having been in one in grad school led by Michael Denning, who was part of that Birmingham School of cultural studies and theory, and [who] studied under Stuart Hall. Stuart Hall, I would say, is the primary person, in terms of influencing pedagogy that is rooted in praxis––in the sense of his work with Open University, but also in terms of workshopping, sharing work, being generous, and understanding what is a work in progress. Also Raymond Williams and Keywords [1976]. Even though there was a space for that at Yale, it comes from home: from a Black British experience. Also, Black was a term––more so in the 70s and 80s obviously––that was one of Afro-Asian solidarity, in the political project. That’s my starting point in terms of my dad and what he taught me about what it means for him to be British.

JK: I love that. You have a significant Twitter presence: would you identify as a public intellectual? What does it mean to you that you’re interfacing both with current affairs––the speed at which things happen online––and in terms of the intellectual dialogues that you’re having online?

TLG: I can answer that question by also addressing food from your previous question: the difference between the mediums of Twitter and Instagram. They move at such different speeds. Lucas Sin, for instance, as a chef, is such a huge presence on Instagram but has no Twitter presence at all. I feel the opposite, where I understand Twitter because it’s such an academic space––whereas Instagram, even though I am a very visual studies person, something about Instagram is slower.

I only started cooking a year ago, April [2020]. It’s really nice to be able to have a place to document, where I’m proud of being able to cook on Instagram, and then also sharing that on Twitter felt relevant because of the book I’m writing. I have a whole chapter on food. I had never thought about actually trying to cook these foods that I'm writing about! So it’s just been a process of learning out loud very publicly, on Twitter. Trying to model what it means to learn and teach oneself how to do something, which is how I started DJing as well… So maybe just trying to encourage people that you don't need permission from anyone to start something. You are not gonna be good at it at first, but you can learn if it’s something you want to do.

JK: You mentioned your book Black Capital, Chinese Debts, but your website also mentioned you’re writing a book on ecological poetics. These are two different projects… Can you tell us more about them?

TLG: [That one] is called After Eden. I have a fellowship this year to get back to that book, and it’s in progress. It’s actually quite engaged in the history of art history, and [the] climate crisis. Again, I’m looking at Afro-Asian questions in terms of the histories of different non-human ecologies.

JK: If you could take down the Rhodes statue at the front of Oriel College, Oxford, how would you do it? It’s very high up and there’s a lot of pigeon wire. This is a question I’ve been asking a lot––hypothetically, of course.

TLG: I don't know that I would want to take it down.

JK: Fascinating.

TLG: I would want to defer to people who study landscape architecture to really think critically about all of these structures. What is the performance in that act? I’m very supportive of the vandalism, of taking the statues down. I feel like there's a horizon for something else that you could do.

JK: Every building is washed in blood for sure; there are a lot more fundamental things to be taking action against. Here in the U.K., they have taken the statues thing really seriously, but at the same time the more you discourse about it the less close you are to what matters… The taking down of statues like Colston’s in Bristol is interesting from a visual studies perspective, but to what extent can we bring that into more revolutionary acts?

TLG: The Colston videos feel like a performance piece. When I'm feeling down, I watch that and feel so happy to see him rolling! [Laughs] With [the Oriel Rhodes] statue, what I would want to see is Oxford saying, ‘Kara Walker, Keith Piper, Yinka Shonibare: here, you have this project, do what you will.’ I think I'm not equipped to know the full range of what can be done to these statues now––to repurpose them, to make them into a site for something that calls our attention to it: doesn’t just erase it, but really fucks with it. That’s what I wanna see happen, for us to really question value. So I would love to see an artist play with it. And Oxford paying the artist a lot of money to do it!