Archive of Tongues

“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

"A stunningly vulnerable act of theory-making through the mother’s tongue which should enrich conversations on queerness and storytelling in South Asian and Pakistani diaspora." - Rajorshi Das, South Asian Review

"Autotheory here becomes a practice of building connection and transforming affect, creating new stories from the old. There is clearly something reparative that motivates and guides the writing as the lines between private and public, exterior and interior become both blurred and transgressed." - Stephanie Clare, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

"In this never ending era of ideological sparring, . . . Moon Charania’s Archive of Tongues feels like a revolutionary breath of fresh air. . . . By insistently centering feminized care, care labors, and erotic desires, Charania produces a beautiful book that successfully balances theory, memoir, and poetry." - V. Varun Chaudhry, Signs