In this chapter I propose to look at how encounters born from crossing boundaries between territories, cultures, languages and memories can either amplify or mitigate relations of antagonism, domination or rivalry. Stemming from different engagements with the colonial past and its postcolonial avatars, and presenting contrasting views of the colonial fortune, these relations lay bare the imperfections, frictions and jagged edges of contemporary identity construction. I will consider “the dialectic of self and the other than self” in contemporary narratives in French inasmuch as it is predicated on but also opposed to an idea of collective or national identity. In Oneself as Another, Paul Ricoeur posits the distinction between two distinct meanings of identity that arise from the Latin terms ipse and idem. Idem-identity stresses the permanence and continuity of the self, its sameness as opposed to concepts like “‘other,’ ‘contrary,’ ‘distinct,’ ‘diverse,’ ‘unequal,’ ‘inverse’” (Ricoeur 1992, 3). Ipse-identity opens itself to difference and otherness since it “involves a dialectic complementary to that of selfhood and sameness, namely the dialectic of self and the other than self” (Ricoeur 1992, 3).

As Ricoeur notes with regard to what he calls “the most harmful ideologies of ‘national identity’”:

In the postcolonial context, contrasting narratives of historical and identitarian anchoring and the rejection of stereotypical sameness are equally precipitated by transcultural, global and transfrontier encounters, which Mireille Rosello has dubbed “performative.” Such phenomena “[coincide] with the creation of new subject-positions rather than treating preexisiting (pre-imagined) identities as the reason for, and justification of, the protocol of encounter – whether it is one of violence or trust, respect or hostility” (Rosello 1). While these encounters are a necessary exercise in cultural self-questioning and can provide a welcome threshold for engaging with or indeed opening up to difference, called by Jean-Luc Nancy “la pensée de l'altérité ouverte par et exposée hors de la mêmeté” (Nancy 2005, 41), they can also be the source of self-serving and self-aggrandizing ventures.