Moon Charania discusses her new book, Archive of Tongues, diasporic storytelling, domestic memory, and maternal experience with Sandeep Bakshi.
The latest installment of The International Library series features Moon Charania, a writer and cultural scholar whose work stands at the intersectionality of race, gender, and diasporic studies.
In her new book, Archive of Tongues, 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.
Charania will appear in conversation with Sandeep Bakshi, a Lecturer in Postcolonial and Queer Literatures at Université Paris Cité.
This is a hybrid event. Moon Charania and Sandeep Bakshi will appear in person at the American Library in Paris (17h30 CEST). A live remote viewing will be held in San Francisco (10:30am PDT) and Brooklyn (1:30pm EDT). You can also livestream this event worldwide.
About the International Library
This event is part of The International Library, a series launched in collaboration with the American Library in Paris,(opens in a new tab) Center for the Art of Translation, and the London Library(opens in a new tab) which will offer 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 will 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.