This article explores the way America--as a place both real and imagined--is constructed in the Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim's recent work Amrikanli. While this work openly critiques America's neo imperialist role in the Middle East and its history of self-interested intervention, it also offers another portrait of America, as a nation rife with social decay and lacking a coherent sense of national identity. In this reversal of the cultural encounter, this article attempts to move past misappropriations of Orientalism's methodological legacy by resisting a reading of Ibrahim's work as offering yet another critique of America as merely a flat symbol of power and hegemony. The complexity of the Arab gaze (as spectator, anthropologist, and writer) vis-a-vis the Americans reflects the need for a more critical examination of the paradoxes and incoherencies that mark such localized cultural encounters. **********
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