Description
Book SynopsisMoon Charania explores feminine dispossession and the brown diaspora through a reflection on the life of her mother, recovering otherwise silenced modes of brown mothers' survival, disobedience and meaning-making that are often only lived out in invisible, intimate spaces.
Trade 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 *
Table of ContentsPreface 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
