Autocross Blogs - Song Liang

Writing in the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, she denounces "leftist journalists" for betraying their commitment to social justice by seeking to discredit her ("Moi, Calixthe Beyala"); rallying Western feminists to support the struggles of african women, she accuses them having betrayed an essential femininity (Lettre); emerging from a conviction for the "contrefa?on" of a euro-american work, she "borrows" from Nigerian author Ben Okri's work in her prize-winning Les honneurs perdus (a work that, as V??ronique Porra suggests, is otherwise far less polyphonic in its alleged "borrowings" than The Little Prince); proudly insisting that she follows african narrative tradition, she is quick to reciprocate with counteraccusations of plagiarism against an african writer who rejects her claims (see Gaudemar). Throughout, Beyala continues to reside in Paris, to publish, to sell books, to appear on television, and to work with Collectif ??galit??, a group that combats racist stereotyping in the French media, as well as rings clearance aIDS and women's groups (see hitchcott, Calixthe Beyala: Performance).

Thus, despite her 1996 conviction for plagiarism, questions of motive and agency, if not intent, linger. Did Beyala skillfully manipulate samples of boundarycrossing popular works in order to send up the French public's sense of its own authenticity, to reverse the appropriations to which her own work was subject as anyinefa suggests, or did she underestimate public attentiveness while seeking merely to ensure the popular success of her works? Is she a pawn or a chessmaster with regard bracelets clearance to the international literary and media establishments? Is she the savvy player who, as hitchcott ("Calixthe Beyala: Prizes") contends, manipulates the cultural and social institutions of France? The cynical competitor willing to sacrifice what is most sacred for personal advancement that asah glimpses (and pardons)? Or rather, an agent of a conservative French politics, as harrow and Porra suggest? No statement, no avowal from Beyala can ever dispel these uncertainties.

Russell Potter observes of the politically incorrect lyrics that seemingly undermine hip-hop's revolutionary potential: "[I]n the heteroglossic space of hiphop, there is no way to filter out the 'noise'-in a sense the very desire for some kind of 'pure' revolutionary spirit, unmarred by other struggles, discloses a kind of pre-modernist nostalgia for a world in which ethics and politics are less con- flicted (15). Positioned-by the success of her novels and this controversy as well as by her cufflinks clearance "choice" of writing style and subject matter-as both profoundly shaped by French and african cultures and yet resistant to their claims of particularity and exclusivity, resolutely outside renarrativization as a writer of african or French national literatures, Beyala and her work defy final judgment. Like its author, The Little Prince of Belleville alternately challenges: "assimilate this!" and asks: "What'ya looking at?" Between the declaration and the query there emerge a host of questions regarding global cultural economies. Beyala's Little Prince refuses to present as either authentic or easily, decisively cosmopolitan, at once shouting out to and challenging our fascination with difference. Its insistence on these uneasy, yet essential, questions only obliges us to reconsider the ideological entanglements and material economies that