In recent decades, focus on transnational and cultural diversity in Arab literary production has expanded the definition and contours of what constitutes ‘Arabic’ literature. Whether through revisiting past stories, appropriating imperial texts or forging larger configurations of national and regional histories, this output constitutes an intervention in the renegotiating of Arab literary history in relation to interconnected global cultures. In Laila Lalami’s The Moors’ Account (2014), the author revisits Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s report on the Narváez’s failed expedition to Florida, the southwest and Gulf coast known as La Relación, and one of the early canonical texts of imperial Spain. By retelling he story from the point of view of Mustapha or Estebanico, one of the four survivors of the shipwrecked party, Lalami not only gives voice to the perspective of the first Arab-African encounter with the New World, but she contributes to the new and emerging modes of Arab cultural production in which diversity of race, ethnicity and religion is crucial to this new configuration. In my paper, I look at how this appropriation of a foundational text of early modern imperial exploration disrupts Eurocentric historical representation of the New World and highlights historical plurality within constructions of Arab literary and cultural history. Unlike the imperial monolithic and nationalistic paradigm of the original report, this narrative privileges a transnational mode of reading Arab cultural history and emphasizes a fluid and evolving concept of the subject positions in contact with indigenous modes of cultural practice. The novel also not only reflects this transformation through the more conciliatory and inclusive vision of the narrator but also performs it structurally through its style and rhetoric. I also engage with how this narrative intermingles elements from multiple Arabic narrative traditions to promote plurality through linguistic and cultural heteroglossia.