In May 1996 Beyala was charged with having partially plagiarized Howard Buten's novel, Burt, in her novel, Le petit prince de Belleville[Loukoum: the Little Prince of Belleville], and was ordered to pay Buten and his publisher substantial damages plus costs. In November 1996 Pierre Assouline, editor of the literary magazine Lire, publicly accused Beyala of having plagiarized Ben Okri's The Famished Road in Les Honneurs perdus. Ironically, the latter novel had been awarded the prestigious Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française exactly one month earlier, on 24 October 1996. What the paradox of 1996 exemplifies is the very mixed reception of Beyala and her writing in her adopted country, France. It also points to what will emerge in this book as the ever-shifting positioning of Calixthe Beyala by readers on the one hand and by Beyala herself on the other. This chapter will consider the unique status of Beyala as a famous black African woman writer living in France. Beginning with a discussion of the reception of her work, not just in France but also in Africa, I shall evaluate the ways in which Beyala has become something of an icon of black femininity in France through her fictional writings, her polemical public statements and her TV and radio appearances. An analysis of the reception and representation of Beyala and her writing will consider the extent to which she has been incorporated into majority ethnic culture in France. It will also begin to trace the effects of a French politics of positioning on the postcolonial phenomenon that is Calixthe Beyala. Taking as its starting point the influential work of Graham Huggan, this chapter will evaluate the commodification of Beyala in France as a symptom of the ‘postcolonial exotic’.

In terms of marketing, Beyala's fiction fits the category of what Huggan describes as the ‘anthropological exotic’ which ‘allows for a reading of African literature as the more or less transparent window onto a richly detailed and culturally specific, but still somehow homogeneous – and of course readily marketable – African world’.