Since it began to coalesce in its current form in the 1980s, Arab American literary study has mostly structured itself as a branch of ethnic history, with literary expression offering a window onto a relatively coherent (albeit assailed) ethnic subject whose coherence, in turn, is anchored in a “homeland.” In this, Arab American literary study largely follows its parent field, Arab American studies, which consolidated in the late 1960s and emerged in (and grounded itself in the epistemologies of) disciplines such as history, sociology, and anthropology. This ethnic project leverages conceptual anchors such as dialectics of home, assimilation, migration, memory, cultural exchange, nostalgia, and dynamics of citizenship and transnationality, among others; but whatever its specific configurations, Arab American literary study can too easily assume its primary task is to represent the history of an Arab American ethnic subject. Rather than belonging primarily to the history of a nationalized ethnic subject— via interpretive frames such as Arab migration or Diaspora, for example—Palestinian American literature should be approached as a particular regime of writing that obeys its own logic and has its own history. While Arab American literary study certainly organizes its knowledge practices around an ethnically legible subject (that, following Barbara Harlow, we might term resistant), Palestinian American literature is less genetically dependent on the normalized self-evidence of that subject than it offers ironic analytical perspective on that subject’s normalization, most notably through an extended and multivalent exploration of the thematics of futurity. In this paper I argue that Palestinian American literary texts—work by writers such as Susan Abulhawa, Laila Halaby, Hala Alyan, Diana Abu Jaber, and Randa Jarrar, among others—frequently, in their elevation of a poetics of the future over a backwards-looking territorialism, critically contest a subject-based, territorial-nationalist, ethnic historicism. Specifically, considered together they demonstrate that ethnic culture should be understood as a function of repetition rather than of inheritance—and that therefore Palestinian American literary study needs to develop critical paradigms other than territory-based nation-cultural negotiation.