PRE-ORDER:
On Sale Date: April 25, 2023
Now entering its third decade in print, Dionne Brand’s groundbreaking A Map to the Door of No Return has emerged as a modern classic, a disquisition on ‘being’ in the Black diaspora. With a new afterword by Saidiya Hartman.
“This book is a world, a triumph of art and thought, a compass for the ages.” —David Chariandy
A Map to the Door of No Return explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is a brilliantly insightful, beautifully nuanced and poetic book of discovery that, in the twenty years since its publication, has become a classic work of nonfiction about borders and belonging, migration and identity.
Drawing on ideas about cartography, travel, African ancestry, the construction of histories and politics, philosophies, and literatures, Dionne Brand also examines her own narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, and journeys across the North American landscape to sketch the shifting boundaries of "home" and "nation."
The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers both to a place in the imagination and a point in history—the so-called Middle Passage, which imbues the quest for identity and place with profound meaning and resonance in our age of heterogenous identities.
A stunningly original work that now takes its place as a foundational text and a modern classic.
