Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Fugitive Archives: My Family and the American Myth of Belonging

Fugitive Archives: My Family and the American Myth of Belonging

Angel-Ajani, Asale

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralGeneral Racism & Ethnic Studies

Publisher Price: $29.00

PREORDER - Expected ship date October 6, 2026

ISBN10: 1643753185
ISBN13: 9781643753188
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: Oct 6 2026
Pages: 288
Height: 0.89 Width: 5.75 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
An incisive, lyrical exploration of one family's history that radically overturns American myths about race, violence, and belonging.

Fugitive Archives is a deeply moving and powerful account of America's tortured landscape of race and class, all too often hidden behind the facade of a devotion to liberty and equality. A must-read as the country reaches 250 years of its existence.--Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of On Juneteenth and The Hemingses of Monticello

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.

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