Into and Out of Dislocation

A thought-provoking meditation on the connections between landscape, race, and familyIt was on his third or fourth trip there that the poet C. S. Giscombe grew aware of the space Canada had staked out in his imagination. Giscombe later spent a winter with his family in British Columbia, and his time there provides a lens through which he interrogates his preoccupation with Canada's otherness. Giscombe writes that "border crossings are always sexy. And racial." And so this book is filled with both actual and metaphoric exploration--and his travels serve as points of departure for a series of riffs on racial, national, physical, and psychological borders.At the heart of this book is the author's ambivalent pursuit of John Robert Giscome, a man who may or may not be a relative. John R., as Giscombe calls him, was a black Jamaican explorer who flourished in British Columbia during the last half of the nineteenth century. Giscombe documents the places that John R. passed through, and he uncovers stories about mining, pioneer life, and even cannibalism. Giscombe likes to imagine John R. as a "self-aware outsider," and that status comes to seem more important--more interesting--than any historical truth.Into and Out of Dislocation is an intriguing and wryly told travel memoir by a writer Henry Louis Gates called a "major figure in contemporary African American letters."