The International Library

The International Library: Brown Diaspora with Moon Charania

Wednesday, 1:30 pm EDT April 3, 2024

Livestreamed

Join us online for a livestreamed conversation about diasporic storytelling, domestic memory, and maternal experience. Moon Charania is a writer and cultural scholar whose work stands at the intersection of race, gender, and diasporic studies. In her new book, Archive of Tongues, Charania weaves together the personal and the theoretical, using her own mother’s life as a prism to refract upon the broader experiences of brown women around the world. Her work examines histories of migration, dispossession, violence, and sexuality, offering a fresh perspective on rhythms of everyday life for marginalized women. At its heart, Archive of Tongues not only uncovers the hidden archives of brown mothers’ lives, but also invites us to reconsider the foundational assumptions of feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies.

Charania will appear in conversation with Sandeep Bakshi, Associate Professor of Decolonial, Postcolonial and Queer Studies at University Paris Cité.

This conversation will be held at The American Library in Paris and livestreamed as part of the International Library series. Online attendees will be able to pose questions along with in-person attendees in Paris.

About the International Library

This event is part of The International Library, a series launched in collaboration with the American Library in Paris, Center for the Art of Translation, and the London Library which offers conversations across time, place, and language. The International Library celebrates the live diffusion of in-person conversations in the hope of connecting new audiences across land and sea for a collective, intercultural experience. These conversations broach deeper questions about writing and translation as we learn to think critically about how stories are told, investigating the points of view, the timing of the translations, and the intended or assumed audiences as well as inspiration, philosophy, and craft.

In Conversation

Moon Charania

Moon Charania

Moon Charania is an Associate Professor of International Studies and Comparative Women’s Studies at Spelman College. Dr. Charania is a feminist theorist whose research explores the psychosocial dimensions of the lives of women of color – she investigates social, political, and intimate issues in relation to violence and care, gender and sexuality, racism, and the diasporic experience. She is the author of two books, Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness (Duke University Press, 2023) and Will the Real Pakistani Woman Please Stand Up: Empire, Visual Culture, and the Brown Female Body (McFarland 2015). Charania is also the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships, including the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University (2024), a Fulbright Specialist Appointee (2023), Emory University Psychoanalytic Society (2023), a Fellow at Emory University James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference (2018). She is beginning a new book project on brownness and femicide.
Sandeep Bakshi

Sandeep Bakshi

Sandeep Bakshi researches on transnational queer and decolonial enunciation of knowledges. He received his PhD from the School of English, University of Leicester, UK, and is currently employed as an Associate Professor of Decolonial, Postcolonial and Queer Studies at University Paris Cité. He coordinates two research seminars, “Peripheral Knowledges” and “Empires, Souths, Sexualities,” and leads the Pôle Société Civile of the Cité du Genre Institute, Université Paris Cité. Co-editor of Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions (Oxford: Counterpress, 2016), ‘Decolonial Trajectories’, special issue of Interventions (2020), and Qu’est-ce que l’Intersectionnalité? Dominations plurielles : sexe, classe et race (2021), he has published on queer and race problematics in postcolonial literatures and cultures. He is the co-founder and serves on the board of the Decolonizing Sexualities Network.

Featured Book

.

Archive of Tongues

By Moon Charania

Published by Duke University PRess

PURCHASE

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.

About this series