About the book:
"In Archive of Tongues Moon Charania explores feminine dispossession and the brown diaspora through a reflection on the life of her mother. Drawing on her mother’s memories and stories of migration, violence, sexuality, queerness, domesticity, and the intimate economies of everyday life, Charania conceptualizes her mother’s tongue as an object of theory and an archive of brown intimate life. By presenting a mode of storytelling that is sensual and melancholic, piercing and sharp, Charania recovers otherwise silenced modes of brown mothers’ survival, disobedience, and meaning making that are often only lived out in invisible, intimate spaces, and too often disappear into them. In narrating her mother’s tongue as both metaphor for and material reservoir of other ways of knowing, Charania gestures to the afflictions, limits, and failures of feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholarly interrogations and the consequences of closing the archive of the brown mother."
“Moon Charania’s rearticulations of the now-sedimented tropes of nation, gender, and patriarchy are very moving. I found myself with an entirely new set of questions about my own theorizing, feminism, and prejudices in regard to not only decolonial and gender studies, but my family history as well. While Archive of Tongues is deeply personal, it productively unsettles what much of Western feminism continues to take for granted, if not reify, about women in the Global South, Pakistani women, brown women, and migrant women. This book will be so important to feminist, decolonial, and transnational thinkers and writers as a coming-of-age feminist diasporic perspective on grappling with gendered and raced intergenerational trauma and violence.” — Jasbir K. Puar, author of The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability
About the author:
Moon Charania is Associate Professor of International Studies and Comparative Women Studies at Spelman College and author of Will the Real Pakistani Woman Please Stand Up?: Empire, Visual Culture, and the Brown Female Body.
Moon Charania will discuss the book in conversation with Mariam Durrani.
Mariam Durrani is a linguistic anthropologist and a professorial lecturer at American University’s School of International Service. Her scholarship and advocacy are located at the intersection of global racialization, Muslim youth identity, migration, and critical education studies in the U.S., Pakistan, and online.
Buy your copy of Archive of Tongues to pick it up at the event and have it signed!
Accessibility note: This event is up two flights of stairs and Lost City Books does not have an elevator. Please email events@lostcitybookstore.com with any accessibility questions or requests.
This is a free event. No ticket necessary to get in, but RSVPs are appreciated as they help us anticipate the number of guests. Come early to get a seat!