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.
Meet the speaker and chair
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 Fellow (2023), and 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.
Emrah Karakuş is an LSE fellow in Gender and Human rights and his interdisciplinary research lies at the intersection of cultural anthropology, critical security studies, and gender and sexuality studies, with a focus on the modern Middle East. He is currently working on his book project, Queer Debt: Affective Politics of Security and Intimacy in Kurdish Turkey, which draws on 18 months of Wenner-Gren Foundation-funded fieldwork, exploring how the Kurdish notions of debt (bedel), right, and repayment are taken up, adapted, and deployed by queer and trans Kurds as they stake claims to a livelihood.
More about this event
This event is being hosted by the Department of Gender Studies and is a part of our 30th Anniversary calendar of events. The department pioneers intersectional, interdisciplinary and transnational teaching and research, addressing the tenacity of gendered power relations and gendered inequalities in times of global transformations. Established in 1993, LSE Gender is the largest Department of Gender Studies in Europe.
You can stay up to date on what's happening at LSE Gender through signing up to our public newsletter, following our Twitter account, and subscribing to our YouTube channel.
From time to time there are changes to event details so we strongly recommend that if you plan to attend this event you check back on this listing on the day of the event.
Whilst we are hosting this listing, LSE Events does not take responsibility for the running and administration of this event. While we take responsible measures to ensure that accurate information is given here this event is ultimately the responsibility of the organisation presenting the event.