ARCHIVE OF TONGUES | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation
Date and Time
May 1, 2024 6:00 pm
Location
14th & V
2021 14th St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20009
May 1, 2024 6:00 pm
14th & V
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 is joining us on the Busboys stage with Dr. Stevie Larson to share brown immigrant mothers' stories on sexuality, violence, racism and survival. Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and Charania will be signing following the program.
This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of ARCHIVE OF TONGUES will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is in person and will not be livestreamed.
We ask that guests RSVP in order to receive direct updates about the event from Busboys and Poets Books
Moon Charania is an Associate Professor in International Studies at Spelman College and Affiliate faculty in Comparative Women’s Studies. Charania is a feminist theorist who researches and publishes in the area of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and psychoanalysis. She is the author of two books, Will the Real Pakistani Woman Please Stand Up: Empire, Visual Culture, and the Brown Female Body (McFarland 2015) and most recently, Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness (Duke University Press, 2023).
Charania is also the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships, including the Spelman College Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship (2018), a Rockefeller Grant to study psychoanalysis in the Global South (2023), a Fellow at Emory University James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference (2018) and a Fellow at the National Humanities Center (2024). Charania has recently been appointed as a Fulbright Specialist to develop Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies programs across the Global South. She is beginning a new book project on brownness and femicide.
Stevie Larson is a writer based in Atlanta, Georgia. He has a doctorate in geography from University of North Carolina and previously served as assistant professor of sociology at Spelman College. As a member of the Team Colors Collective, Larson co-authored the book Wind(s) from Below: Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (Microcosm, 2010) and co-edited the anthology Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States (AK Press, 2010).
