This paper examines how two contemporary Arab-American novels, Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account (2014) and Rabih Alameddine’s The Angel of History (2016), negotiate concepts and experiences of home and belonging before and after migration, whether forcible or voluntary, from home(s) of origin in the Arab world to new ones in the United States of America. Set in two different time periods, the 16th century in The Moor’s Account and the turn of the 21st century in The Angel of History, the two novels represent the legacies of modern imperial and neo-imperial formations of national belonging that are rooted in predetermined territorial, racialized, gendered, and ethnicized identities. I argue that the novels disrupt these traditional and concretized boundaries of belonging whether in the formerly colonized Arab home of origin or in its new counterpart in the United States by creatively crossing their dividing lines. The paper explores the complex migrant processes of exchange, transfer, translation, and hybridization and how they reshape the traditional categories of race, gender, and ethnicity, and thereby the immigrant’s sense of belonging at national/transnational intersections.