There are few works published in the past 20 years that have had as profound and generative an influence on diverse audiences as Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return. A poetic text comprised of essays, memories, vignettes, historical fragments, and readings of painting and literature toward a theorization of Diasporic Black life (Toronto and Vancouver, Johannesburg, Grenada and Trinidad) in the wake of slavery, A Map to the Door of No Return has inspired and challenged readers in North America and around the world who have taken up Brand’s work on the door as schema—the opposite of a shoring up of a narrative of origins—and its challenges to what nation and belonging might mean, after that step through the ‘door of no return.’ In the academic realm, Map has been the subject of theses and dissertations, quotations and citations appear in the work of literary scholars of Canadian literature, Caribbean literature, Diaspora literature and literary theory, but also in the work of historians, sociologists, visual artists, anthropologists, and theorists across a range of disciplines. Outside of the academy, Map has inspired a variety of expressive responses. Map introduces and puts pressure on any number of terms in relation to Black life: Cartography and Geography; Memory; Longing; Return; Belonging; Archive; Diaspora; Literature; History. Map continues to be a generative point of departure for work in Black Studies.