Évoluée or Intégrée: Black and Beur Publishing Practices in Contemporary Metropolitan French Women Writing

The debate regarding the labeling of certain authors and of their literatures as “French” or “francophone” gained increased interest from the general media in 2006 when a series of prestigious French literary prizes were awarded to a number of écrivains étrangers de langue française.¹ “Pour une littérature-monde en Français,” a manifesto signed by forty-four established authors including Tahar Ben Jelloun, Maryse Condé, and Edouard Glissant was published in the French newspaper Le Monde on March 15, 2007 and advocated for the banning of the term “francophone” in favor of the development of a “world-literature in French.”² The manifesto’s supporters particularly sought to annihilate the bond that was previously established between authors of immigrant descent and France’s colonial past under the “francophone” label, a bond which forever kept these authors outside of the metropolitan French literature realm since it served as a reminder of the former colonies’ subjection to the French language as part of the French colonial empire’s mission civilisatrice.³

Today, beyond the labeling of literary productions as French or francophone and beyond the efforts to create a space for a “littérature-monde en Français,” a visual form of literary classification subsists in the case of female authors who write in the French language and whose ancestry ties them to Africa or the Maghreb, particularly in the metropolitan French imaginary: for the public they are not French or francophone, but Black or Beur, an image that is fabricated and conveyed through the use of paratextual clues chosen by these authors’ publishers to accompany their narratives.⁴

In this article I consider the packaging of French metropolitan authors Marie NDiaye, Calixthe Beyala and Nina Bouraoui’s texts in exploring their publishing houses’ choice of paratext as well as these authors’ expressions of compliance, defiance or neutrality regarding their fabricated authorial identities and their status as neocolonial cultural commodities.⁵ The Éditions Stock’s transition from the exotic colonial packaging of French-Cameroonian Beyala’s first two novels in the late 1980s to the neutral paratexts and integration within their littérature française collection of French-Algerian Bouraoui in the mid-2000s is particularly demonstrative of a shifting commercial process of audience formation that appears to be anchored in the author’s assumed racial, cultural and national identity. Reflecting on the controversy surrounding NDiaye’s winning of the Prix Goncourt in 2009 for Trois femmes puissantes, on Beyala’s condemnation for plagiarism and subsequent awarding of the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française in 1996, and on Bouraoui’s undisputed acclaim, this article examines the use of paratextual clues in the negotiation of the female francophone authorial identity in France.

The semantics attached to the terms “Black” and “Beur” as they are used in this article purposely reflect the simplistic racial binary that characterizes the metropolitan publishing practices affecting the postcolonial authors discussed in this study. The term “Black” here connotes the literature of authors of Sub-Saharan African descent that continues to be marketed as exotic and erotic, a reminder of France’s colonial past and female objectification in Africa, as evidenced in Beyala’s publications. Despite the fact that the Franco-Cameroonian author’s entire career has taken place in the Metropole, her literature is often assumed to belong to the “francophone” or “African” realm because of her Cameroonian background (she emigrated to France at age 17). This in turns translates into her various publishing houses’ choice of paratext which evidently emphasizes exotic, African, and sometimes sexual stereotypes, effectively branding her work as “Black.” This article will demonstrate how Beyala and NDiaye’s public personae are intrinsically linked to these essentialist publishing practices, as they are presented in the paratext of their literary productions as successful Black authors, portrayed as having risen above their genetic predicament to attain the status of évoluées.⁶

The notion of “Black publishing” is additionally attached to the political implications that the term “Black” has come to ideologically encompass...