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My Family and the American Myth of Belonging
by Asale Angel-Ajani
An incisive, lyrical exploration of her family's history radically overturns American myths about race, violence, and belonging.
Asale Angel-Ajani and her twin, the only Black children in a working-class white family, were shuffled between relatives, coming of age in a country that offered little refuge. Years later, Angel-Ajani dove into the archives, searching for an explanation for her family's and her country's contradictions, and for her own unshakeable anger.
What she found were records and stories of her ancestors enslaved and free, Indigenous and white, members of the KKK and Black fugitives of a justice system that was rarely just. How could so much love live alongside such hate and prejudice, within the same family? Forged by the violent systems that rewarded racial terror and segregation, Angel-Ajani's ancestors built their lives together anyway, on the shaky foundation of love and cognitive dissonance.
Fugitive Archives reveals that we are not a country of strangers split into "us" and "them," who merely need to get to know each other in order to empathize. We have always been deeply entangled. This story of one family's grief, betrayal, and courage is a vital exploration of race and class, a map for survival and resistance, and a necessary reckoning―for only when we acknowledge the complex, messy truth of who we are as a country, can we shape a more just future.
"Fugitive Archives is a furious and compassionate refusal to settle for easy answers. Through the violent contradictions embedded within her own lineage, Angel-Ajani writes with stunning precision about how our bodies carry the webs of history that shape our most intimate bonds." ―Tessa Hulls, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Feeding Ghost
This information about Fugitive Archives was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Asale Angel-Ajani is the author of A Country You Can Leave, a New York Times recommended book and Amazon Editors' Pick for Fiction, and the nonfiction book Strange Trade. Her work has been featured on CNN, in Ms. Magazine, and on NPR. A recipient of support from the Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller Foundations, she was a Hutchins Family Fellow at Harvard University. She holds a PhD from Stanford University and lives in New York City.
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