Moon Charania | Archive of Tongues
Friday 14 March 2025, 2pm
Further details will follow soon.
Speaker: Moon Charania, Ph.D.
2024-25 Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies, Princeton University
Associate Professor of International Studies, Spelman College
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.
Moderator: Avik Sarkar (University of Oxford)
Avik Sarkar (she/they) is a Bengali writer and artist from Boston who studies the aesthetics and politics of transsexual life. Avik has presented her work at Lancaster University, the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA, and the Connecticut Ethnic Studies Symposium. She graduated magna cum laude and with distinction from Yale, where her thesis was funded by the Bruce L. Cohen LGBT Studies Research Award.
Avik received a research fellowship from the arts organization Visual AIDS to support an archival project that will be published in 2025. Her writing is also forthcoming in Lateral, the journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Avik is currently pursuing her master’s in women's, gender, and sexuality studies as a Clarendon Scholar at Jesus College, Oxford.
