The binary concept of the Other found in European and American Orientalism is disrupted when viewed from a Latin American perspective. In the writings of the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, for example, the Other is not entirely a foreign entity but rather something that is at once foreign and yet familiar. A similar relationship can be found between the East and the West in the writing by Kuwaiti Mai Al-Nakib. In Borges’ short story collection El Aleph (perhaps not coincidentally the first letter of the Arabic alphabet), the reader finds mirroring images of the Other which lead to an ironic familiarity between East and West. Many of his stories, like those found in Al-Nakib’s collection, deal with an ongoing quest for identity and belonging, a quest shared by many writers of the South. As argued by Julia Kushigian in Orientalism in Hispanic Literary Tradition (1991), one cannot apply a traditional notion of Orientalism in a Latin American context as this does not take into consideration the complex relationship of Spain to the Arab world during the 800 years of cultural interaction during the period of Al-Andalus. Michel Foucault has also stated that power is a “complex strategic situation in a particular society” thus relationship of the Gulf countries with the West does not lend itself to a simple transplantation of Said’s theories because many of these countries were not directly colonized, and because their current relationship with the West has differences from other post-colonial nations. This paper seeks to challenge the hegemonic narrative of Orientalism held by the West by introducing a “south-to-south” exploration of the image of the Other in Arabic literature, using theoretical approaches and literary comparisons by and about writers from Latin America. This will serve to complicate and enrich Orientalism and its usefulness in analyzing new literature from Arab Gulf nations.