Haidamteu Zeme
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Haidamteu Zeme is a research fellow at the Center for the summer of 2025. As part of her visiting fellowship at DiML under the 'Modes and Media in Narrative Studies' project, which is supported by the Scheme for Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC) of the Government of India, she examines discursive formations in language through the framework of translation. “Living Archives: Diagrammatic Histories as Narratological Ways of Being.” Living archives and diagrammatic histories are two key terms that help frame the idea of ‘non-text’ conceptualised in my work. The work engages with questions of form, media, and medium through discourses on language. It critically examines theories of language, particularly their ideological framework and historical constructions, to highlight the affect, “Eurocentric” (Samir Amin, 1970) values have had on languages that have been “cartographically zoned” outside Europe (Apter, Lezra, Wood, 2004). How do we grapple with the limits of representation, language, meaning-making, and the desire to structure and archive ‘gaps’ despite the inherent and inevitable instability of memory (Derrida 1995). The framework proposes to rethink the ‘textual’ properties of speech, images, textiles, and monolithic structures with which communities interact, interpret, and ‘read’ meanings onto them, while also drawing attention to epistemic privileges of ‘writing.’ Haidamteu Zeme is a doctoral fellow in Literature and a Teaching Assistant at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. Her research interests include comparative literature, translation studies, and affective archives. She is currently working on a project with Zubaan Publications on women’s movements in India from the 1940s to the 1950s. She is the 2024-2025 Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation and Asia Art Archive (SSAF-AAA) Grantee for Archiving Histories of Ideas, Art, and Visual Cultures https://ssaf.in/grants/2024-haidamteu-zeme-n/ . She was the recipient of the Zubaan Research Grant for Young Researchers from Northeast India (2022-2023) https://zubaanprojects.org/blog/ and a Summer School Fellow at the Highland Institute, Nagaland (2024). Two of her essays on translation and oral archives have been published by South Asian Review (2023) https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2023.2200622 and International Society of Folk Narrative Research (2024) https://isfnr.org/2024/12/the-latest-newsletter-number-12-2024/ . Haidamteu’s prose poem on Manipur was published in SAPIENS (2024) https://www.sapiens.org/?s=Haidamteu. |
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