The Algerian writer Amara Lakhous, in his novel Clash of Civilizations (2008), views metropolitan Rome as a dubious space where cultural identity is negotiated, producing in Jacques Derrida’s words, a self that, “in departing from itself, lets itself be put into question by the other” (96). In its encounter with the other, the self indulges in a process of becoming other than itself (Derrida 119, 133), and in its “adventuring outside oneself towards the unforeseeably-other” (95), the self has to face “the impossibility of return to the same”. The acknowledgment of this inescapable impossibility of return to the same after encountering the other plays an active role in approaching postcolonial identities in exilic spaces; a presumption that will be put under investigation in this paper. This paper, therefore, offers to examine the fertile, contested and surprising intersection between notions of global space and cultural identity. The displaced cultural identity of immigrants as well as natives is defined by its spatiotemporal framework and produces different experiences of marginality and unbelonging. The exilic space of Rome becomes in Lakhous’ novel an index, a cipher for both the characters’ bodies and stories where attempts of assimilation are faced with constant failure, leaving profoundly dislocating effects. The paper also offers to explore the approaches by ethnic communities to the notion of ‘homeland’, sense of belonging and identity formation in the context of migration. Eventually, the paper proposes to address some dilemmas central to debates over cultural identity such as nationalism versus globalization, language as representationally accurate or disconnected from reality, and social space as utopic or dystopic.