Inhabiting Stereotypes to Deconstruct Them: Strategies of Gender and Race Deconstruction in Calixthe Beyala’s L’homme qui m’offrait le ciel

Abstract

The early phases of canonization in modern African literature long privileged male voices. The emergence of women in the literary field from the 1980s onwards constitutes an unprecedented phenomenon. These women writers distinguish themselves and break with the themes developed by their male peers, taking it upon themselves to contest symbolic assignments and deconstruct gender and racial stereotypes. This study analyses the mechanisms of construction and deconstruction of these stereotypes in Calixthe Beyala’s L’homme qui m’offrait le ciel (2007), through the character of Andela, a Black, single, female writer and activist. Drawing on narrative semiotics and enunciative analysis, this reflection shows how the writing manages to deconstruct stereotypes by inhabiting them through the enunciative subjectivity of the ‘I’, novelistic polyphony, humour, irony, plurilingualism and transgressive aesthetics. The main finding is that Beyala’s deconstruction operates not through frontal denunciation but through strategic inhabitation of dominant representations, turning them against themselves.