Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration (review)

The fields of French and Francophone Studies enjoy a symbiotic yet tenuous relationship. Curricular reform and programmatic reorientation have taken place over the past decade or so, such that it has now become common practice for undergraduate and graduate students to engage in interdisciplinary research projects. The work of Cameroonian writer Calixthe Beyala, popularly known as an "Afro French" or "Afro-Parisian" writer since she assumed residency in France during the 1980s, provides a working model for the exploration of the complex and complicated relationship between the Metropole and its former colonial territories. These issues are central to Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration, in which Nicki Hitchcott proposes a holistic examination of the "phenomenon" (3) that is Calixthe Beyala, namely the cumulative "symbolic capital" (37) she has acquired as a novelist, essayist, activist, television and radio personality, and "icon of African femininity" (34). The demands and exigencies associated with such a project can be partly located in the fact that Beyala herself is such a prolific writer and social commentator. To this end, she has received considerable critical attention in the public domain, extensive scholarly attention in the form of articles and essays, yet Hitchcott's is the first comprehensive book-length study.

The originality can be located in the incorporation of various theorizations of Diaspora and migration, but perhaps more useful is the recourse to recent works of gender/performance studies (Judith Butler, Mary Ann Doane, Susan Leigh Foster) and reception studies (Graham Huggan). These prove to be fruitful in the process of unpacking Beyala's "ambivalent" (4) positionality as an African migrant woman writer that has been simultaneously embraced and rejected, consecrated by the French literary establishment (as the recipient of literary prizes), recuperated by hegemonic forces linked to francophonie, operated as an agent of "complicity in her own commodification" (8), been able to "reappropriate and then manipulate the French public's image of her" (32), while also being plagued by incontrovertible accusations of plagiarism that have served to invalidate her production and relegate her to the cultural and social periphery. But these factors also serve to draw attention to the plethora of ways in which Beyala's "unlocatability" (38) calls for a sustained analysis in which the constitutive components of her multiple identities are factored.

"By using the language of migration," Hitchcott convincingly illustrates how "Beyala stresses the cultural separation between the immigrant ghetto of Belleville and the surrounding majority ethnic space of France" (83) while effectively countering "the majority ethnic population's attempts to prescribe migrant identity" (112). Beyala's capacity to navigate unchartered territory, to resort to "performance and improvisation" (111), ultimately both "protect her from containment" (136) and undercut "the dominant discourse's version of normativity in postcolonial France" (136). This reversal, or at least restructuring of structures of power and control allow Beyala "to both appropriate and dismantle the dominant discourse to suit her own agenda" (65).

Hitchcott makes extensive usage of the term "incorporated" to describe those mechanisms aimed at recuperating Beyala (I see this term's other meaning, namely the abbreviation used to designate an established corporation, as equally appropriate in this framework). The marketing and reception of the "exotic" has been emphasized in recent years in France by the prevalence and therefore appeal of sensationalist texts that focus on forced marriages, excision, polygamy, and honor killings. These texts, alongside various works by Beyala, target "the readers' desire for consumption of 'the Other'" (148) in its various guises. And this is where Beyala emerges as a writer engaged in a "self-conscious staging of identity in response to her positioning in the global marketplace" (4). Huggan's notion of "anthropological exotic" (15) as a category that juxtaposes and balances the "strange" (16) with the "familiar" (16) shares points of commonality with Beyala who is "located inside and outside of national culture" (16). However, as Hitchcott shows, "literary incorporation denies cultural difference and suggests a neocolonization of postcolonial writing by publishers in France" (17). Given Beyala's public position on these matters, one must signal to...