Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness

by Moon Charania

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.

192 pages, Paperback

Published August 4, 2023

Reviews

[christina]

got really good after the introduction! i just finished and i already want to reread: i feel like this is a text i can get something out of every time i read it

[Sandra Del Rio · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Let me begin by saying that I reject the psychoanalytic imperative that the daughter first "turn away" from her primary love object: the mother. Conversely and rebelliously, I turn toward my first love: my mother."

This text resonated with me incredibly. This book clutches me--bites me!

[Beau Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

"this tongue, for all its softness, lives between thirty-two teeth — hard, strong, dense, and sharp. Any given second, the teeth can damage, tear, wound the tongue. But the tongue has no choice. It must learn to live among the teeth, between and within the hardness that could individually or collectively destroy the tongue"

Necro-metaphorization and bio-precarity, an inventive and evocative intertwining of sex, death and the navigation of the body-as-archive.

[Nikki Lane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant. A deeply moving meditation on the "brown maternal" and the "mother tongue." Charania's characteristic investment in transnational feminism shines here as she analyzes the devastating effects of sexism, anti-brown (and anti-black) racism in the United States, and nationalism, on the lived reality of her own mother and herself, consequently, as a brown mother.

[Dorilyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

im noticing the academic books I actually adore tend to center the life of one woman who lived promiscuously (relative to their context), feature their wise advice/remedies, and the writer introduces me to a new method/framework.