Diaspora – Decolonising Global Health Archive

By Ranajit Guha

Rethinking the concepts of migration and diaspora, Ranajit Guha focuses on the loss of one’s past and identity resulting from the temporal and spatial distortions imposed by migration. In addition to discussing the migrant’s status at the initial departure, Guha reflects on the migrant’s experience within the host community in the intensity of the immediate present. Suddenly ruptured from the continuity of their own roots, disoriented and with no insights in an incomprehensible present that has no before nor after, migrants are expected to struggle to build themselves a future and a new identity.

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By Moon Charania

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.

Tag: Diaspora

The migrant’s time

Archive of Tongues. An Intimate History of Brownness