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.

Moon Charania is a feminist scholar whose research explores the psychosocial dimensions of the lives of women of color; she investigates social, political, and intimate issues in relation to gender and sexuality, violence and care, racism and the diasporic experience. Dr. Charania is an Associate Professor of International Studies at Spelman College and the 2024–25 Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University. 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). Her most recent book, Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness, has been recognized in the 2023 Year in Books in Critical and Cultural Theory, and included in the State of the Field by Meridians journal. In addition to her books, Charania's work has appeared in leading journals such as Parapraxis, Camera Obscura, Feminist Studies, Feminist Theory, Society and Space, and Sexualities, and her commentary has been solicited in public forums such as USA Today, NBC, Boston Magazine, Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. She has previously been a fellow at the Emory University Psychoanalytic Society, Emory University James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, the National Humanities Center, as the Beyer Resident in Queer Studies at St. Lawrence University, and as a Fulbright Specialist to develop Women, Gender and Feminist Studies in the Global South. Charania is currently working on a third book, Nous Femme Les Dérangées: Essays on Brown Women and Pain.