Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness

In this talk, Moon Charania explores feminine dispossession and the brown diaspora through reflections on her mother’s life. Drawing on her mother’s memories and stories of migration, violence, sexuality, domesticity and the intimate economies of everyday life, Charania conceptualizes her mother’s tongue as both a theoretical object and an archive of brown intimate life. Presenting a storytelling mode that is at once sensual and melancholic, piercing and sharp, she recovers silenced practices of brown mothers’ survival, disobedience and meaning-making. Often lived in invisible intimate spaces and too often lost within them. By narrating her mother’s tongue as both metaphor and material reservoir for other ways of knowing, Charania points to the afflictions, limits and failures of feminist, postcolonial scholarship and to the consequences of closing the archive of the brown mother.

Speaker: Moon Charania, Associate Professor of International Studies at Spelman College and 2024–25 Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University

Charania is a feminist scholar whose work examines the lives of women of color through themes of gender, sexuality, violence, care and diaspora. She is the author of Archive of Tongues and Will the Real Pakistani Woman Please Stand Up and her writing has appeared in leading feminist and cultural theory journals. Her work has been presented internationally and she is completing her third book, Nous Femme Les Dérangées.