The question of who and what is an Arab has been circumscribed by western theories on the origin of peoplehood. Overall, skewed analysis emphasizing British and French colonialist projects ignored long standing historical and cultural interconnectedness in the Levant and beyond since the late nineteenth century. Their aims centered on squaring the interwar mandate system with the “white man’s burden.” Seminal works by Arab scholar since the mid-nineteenth century were echoed by immigrant responses to colonialism, thus articulating pluralist conception of peoplehood and reformed societies with national aspirations. These articulations, were intended as responses to colonialism in the U.S. as they did in the Levant. This rich body of works defies easy translations because it draws on a collective memory immersed in deeper histories from the Arab and Islamic past. Regarding the Levant, Arab Nahdah and feelings of peoplehood and national aspirations were dismissively attributed to Europeans’ colonial institutions and physical structures. The baggage peoples of the Levant took with them on their emigrations amid these momentous events, yielded a breakpoint with strictly classical Arabic-language style in favor of Journalism Arabic. The emergent accessible language, this paper argues, animated formal conception of nation within the U.S. immigrant communities. However, Arab American studies failed to utilize these foundational basis rendering illusive a coherent Arab American narrative. Other reasons, this paper explores are lack historiographies, absence of native Arabic language fluency among the scholars themselves, or any translations of early Arabic text in the U.S., in addition to historically prohibitive immigration restrictions from 1917 to 1965. As a result, ideological alignments within narrow interpretations of Arabism, nation, and peoplehood further distanced Arab American studies from its core foundations. At present, the distinguished literary heritage over the first six decades of Arab American immigration is not part of any cohesive vision of Arab American communities. As a result, neo-Orientalist and essentially ideological alignments within Arab American studies set in where neoliberal intellectualism strayed hopelessly far from nuanced Arab content. The alternative is increasingly malleable representations of Arab Americanness based on narrowly conceived monologues and postmodern psychoanalysis, not historical or literary inquiry into events and rich texts.