Arab American literature is an emerging field, as witness the recent establishment of university centres for Arab American studies, the Arab American National Museum, journals such as Al-Jadid and Mizna, and a variety of celebrated theatre collectives, such as Silk Road Rising. It is also a messy, ill-defined field, with arguments still in progress over terminology (for example Arab American versus MENA, meaning Middle Eastern/North African), inclusion and exclusion, and political issues. Carol Fadda-Conrey does not retreat from the messiness of lives lived between multiple locations, but instead makes that the major strength of a convincing argument, emphasizing the transnational outlook at the centre of Arab American identity and culture. The focus is upon fiction, poetry, drama, nonfiction and some visual works, from the 1990s onwards, which contest erroneous representations of Arab Americans, and develop anti-assimilationist, transnational modes of Arab American belonging which oppose and transform exclusionary US understandings of national membership. In short, the ways in which Arab experience is imagined invite a new engagement with American citizenship.

After an introductory rehearsal of the literary and historical context, four chapters consider a large variety of texts portraying engagement with Arab homelands (particularly Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Egypt). A first chapter considers the demythologizing representation of homelands through parents or grandparents, attacking nostalgia (a memorable discussion of Diana Abu-Jaber's 1993 novel Arabian Jazz, with its family secret of infant daughters buried alive), followed by a chapter on works featuring second- or third-generation characters returning temporarily to ancestral locations and redefining the meaning of home (for example, Mohja Kahf's 2006 The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, in which the devout heroine is astounded to discover that she cannot actually attend a mosque in Saudi Arabia, as she can in her home in Indiana). Chapter 3, the strongest and most interesting, considers protagonists who move between various locales and develop identities which lay claim to multiple territorialized spaces. Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home (2009) traverses Palestine, Kuwait, Alexandria, Jenin and Texas, for example. A final chapter offers a fresh analysis of a series of works connected to the events of 9/11.

As that rapid summary indicates, there is a thematic tendency to the account, which tends to underplay formal or stylistic matters. The wise reader should read the meaty, discursive endnotes in tandem with the chapters. In the body of the text the reader is told that Rabih Alameddine's I, the Divine (2001) is a first-person novel which is made up of a succession of botched first chapters of a memoir. Only the endnote reveals that it also uses third-person narrative, and rewrites some of the chapters from English to French, thus multiplying narrative and cultural viewpoints. The point cries out for more analysis. A passing reference to the image of a mythical winged horse, Saisaban, in Patricia Sarrafian Ward's The Bullet Collection (2003) makes slightly more sense with the knowledge from the endnote that Saisaban is a jinn princess in an Arabic epic, and also a healing plant used in Iraq for windbreaks, though even so the present reviewer remained somewhat in the dark. Some of the writers are already recognized as producing wonderful work (Leila Halaby, Randa Jarrar, Joseph Geha), but the reader coming new to this material would not gain much sense of an aesthetic evaluation. This is a pity since the works' effectiveness as challenge to US hegemonic representations does rather depend on Americans, not just Arab Americans, being attracted to reading them. Fadda-Conrey also spends too much time spelling out what she plans to do before she actually does it, defining terms and creating signposts for the reader; more space could have been freed up for literary analysis. The book took off once the terms had been set up (carefully and with admirable precision); if this had been handled more economically, there would have been more space for discussions of artistry. Arguably, there is no particular virtue to being an Arab American writer but there is to being a fine one, with a major effect on American culture.