20th & 21st Century French & Francophone Studies International Colloquium, “Justice”, 26-28 March 2025 in Greensboro, North Carolina
Hosting institution: University of North Carolina

Le Prix Recherche au présent 2025 a été attribué à Timothy Messen (Emory University) pour sa contribution: “The Non-Hegemonic Etymology and Entomology of “Maringouin””.
“Maringouin” is a moving, border-penetrating, surface-inscribing, resource-extracting word and insect that challenges blood and milk reproduction and lineages by pointing to inter- and intraspecies entanglement as a way of understanding the world and one’s place in it. This paper follows the journey of the word “maringouin” from the Bay of Rio in the 16th century to 17th century Québec and Guadeloupe to the present-day with the Louisiana Mosquito Control Association’s quarterly newsletter. The word “maringouin” derives from a Tupí language, coming into French via contact with Norman sailors. This word is still used throughout the French-speaking Americas (and beyond). Despite its miniscule size, the mosquito is the world’s deadliest animal and trends in global warming indicate that its habitat will only continue to grow. “Maringouin”, the word and insect, island-hops and traces a history of relations across space and time that both documents and subverts the history of colonizers, including their extractive economies. In penetrating the body and language (corps et langue) of the colonizer “maringouin” reveals their fragility and volatility. Etymology and entomology work symbiotically to read “maringouin” as a hyper-local nuisance that evolves alongside global phenomena, splicing the incomprehensible time scales of the Anthropocene, scrambling the logic of the Subject in its exposure to the Other.
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Second classé 2025 : Duarte Bénard da Costa (Cambridge University) pour: “The Many Voices of the Novel: Julia Kristeva’s Quest for Textual Revolution”
Julia Kristeva is well-known for coining the term intertextuality, in her translations of Mikhail Bakhtin into French. In her early work, Texte du roman (1970), Kristeva theorizes the polyphonic novel, building upon Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism. Scholarship has focused on the translational part of her work, and it has highlighted her contribute to literary theory in bringing Bakhtin’s theories to French criticism. This paper defends, however, that more than providing good translations for Bakhtin’s concepts, Julia Kristeva identifies between one and multiple voices a differential space of revolution. Such revolution, then, is contained within her concept of the polyphonic novel.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
benhaim (10 avril 2023). Lauréat 2025. Prix Recherche au présent. Consulté le 19 avril 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/t1md