Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return and the Antiblackness of the Book as an Object

Throughout the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture’s conversations about African American print culture, two strands of thought, feeling, inquiry, and analysis have been in tension. On the one hand are analyses of black agency, analyses that build upon the principled, prolific work of such giants in the field as Frances Smith Foster, whose print culture recovery work records, as W. E. B. Du Bois would say, the “right of black folk to love and enjoy,” as well as struggle.¹ On the other hand are acknowledgments of structuring antiblackness, acknowledgments that formally and informally circulated #handsupdontshoot and