This article examines the cross-cultural perspective offered by the metropolitan French author Patrick Grainville in his novels Les Flamboyants and Le Tyran éternel, set each in a fictional post-1960 independent black African state. In doing so, it identifies an inherent contradiction in the vision and argues that, while setting out to celebrate cultural difference, Grainville ends up paradoxically, if perhaps unwittingly, reasserting the supremacy of the cultural self. The article does not seek to discredit entirely Grainville's cross-cultural endeavour, but does not attempt to overrate it either. Rather it shows how, writing in a post-imperial European historical context of the mid-1970s and the late 1990s, Grainville breaks with colonial modes of cross-cultural perception but only to restate in certain respects the cultural assumptions that tend to underpin those modes of apprehending cultural difference.
8. Measuring cross-cultural perception of educational environment among postgraduates by using PHEEM inventory