Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness

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.

Table of Contents:
Preface  ix Gratitudes  xv Prologue  xxi Introduction. A Story on Tongues  1 1. Abject Tongues  27 2. Forked Tongues  63 3. Promiscuous Tongues  89 4. The Other End of the Tongue  122 Afterword  139 Notes  143 Bibliography  155 Index  163

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.

Review :
“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) “Archive of Tongues is lively, taut, and wickedly smart. Moon Charania unflinchingly guides the reader through biographical, anecdotal, and theoretical interventions. The stakes of her project are major: the reorientation and decolonization of knowledge. Making tangible the depth and instability of bodily/lived knowledge, this compelling book will contribute to psychoanalysis, critical ethnic studies, women of color feminisms, queer studies, and affect studies.” - Amber Jamilla Musser, author of (Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance) "A stunningly vulnerable act of theory-making through the mother’s tongue which should enrich conversations on queerness and storytelling in South Asian and Pakistani diaspora." - Rajorshi Das (South Asian Review)