This panel tells a long history, and wide geographic story, of fugitivity and its rooting in the embodied experiences of enslaved, and later incarcerated, people from the U.S. South. By their very nature, histories of clandestine movement are ephemeral and fleeting. We grapple with these archival challenges by putting forth alternative reading methods that narrate the conspiratorial work of fugitive women and the traces that they left behind. Our collective conversations about what we see in the archive–as well as what historians have wanted to or not wanted to see–will guide us toward questions about strategy and violent self-defense. How did the land imbricate strategies of violent self-defense? And where do we find the remnants of these last-resort attempts to escape recapture?

Finally, our papers consider the filial and familial stakes of marronage and fugitivity. The moment of running away, even if with others, has often been imagined as a solitary one that took people away from kinship. Enriched by the differing historical contexts of marronage during slavery and fugitivity from prisons, we discuss how contesting spatial violence was a matter of love and longing; of imagining different futures together rather than apart; of geographies of kinship that militated against family separation. Through these considerations, we formulate new archival approaches to locating kinship–and the fugitive practices that sustained it–in archives of slavery and prisons.