Word Up welcomes writer and anthropologist Asale Angel-Ajani to discuss her memoir Fugitive Archives: My Family and the American Myth of Belonging, an incisive, lyrical exploration of one family’s history that radically overturns American myths about race, violence, and belonging.

ABOUT THE BOOK
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. Raised in the gaps left behind, they learned how race and betrayal shaped their family legacy and the identities they inherited. When her grandmother, the family’s record keeper, died, Angel-Ajani took up the archive, looking for answers—about her mother’s abandonment, her father’s legal struggles, and her grandmother’s passage from overt racism to an improbable love with her Black step-grandfather. Most urgently, she sought to understand the origins of her inescapable anger.

Tracing ancestors enslaved, Indigenous, free, and white, Angel-Ajani uncovered how people survived violent systems that rewarded compliance and punished mercy—and how some carved pockets of resistance, whose acts of resistance rippled across generations. Through stories of stolen land, the enslavement and murder of her earliest ancestor, her great-grandmother’s role in the WKKK, and the incarceration of a step-grandmother and uncle in a Japanese internment camp, she weaves her linage into the national narrative, exposing connections deliberately erased from official accounts. She reveals a country not of strangers split into “us” and “them,” but of lives deeply entangled.

In a moment defined by moral exhaustion, rising violence, and historical erasure, Fugitive Archives lays bare a nation’s unresolved past through one family’s story of grief, betrayal, courage, and love. It is both a testament and an invitation—a vital exploration of race and class, a map for survival and resistance, and a necessary reckoning with the truths we inherit to reshape a more just future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Asale Angel-Ajani is a writer and anthropologist whose work examines race, migration, incarceration, gender, and belonging. She is an associate professor and director of Women’s and Gender Studies at The City College of New York, with affiliations in anthropology, international studies, and Black studies. She is the author of the novel A Country You Can Leave and the nonfiction book Strange Trade, and has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, New York University’s Gallatin School, and Hong Kong Baptist University. Her fellowships and grants include support from the Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller foundations and a Hutchins Family Fellowship at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Stanford University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Hong Kong.