Arab American writing very frequently ironically focuses on itself—conspicuously so. Literary texts by Arab American authors—Susan Abulhawa, Randa Jarrar, Diana Abu-Jaber, Etaf Rum, Mohja Khaf, Laila Halaby, Hala Alyan, and others—characteristically represent writing, writers, and literature, often making explicit appeal to Arab and Arab American literary traditions. (Sometimes this is particularly, and comically, explicit, as when a character in Khaf’s novel comes across “The Collected Poems of Mohja Khaf Vol. 17.”) In this paper I argue that this self-referentiality shows how the dominance of an ethnic history paradigm in Arab American studies has restricted the disciplinary and methodological possibilities for Arab American literary study. As an identity term, “Arab American” is a catachresis (i.e., following Spivak), and its history warns against grounding Arab American studies in the inevitably naturalizing concept of ethnicity. “Arab American” often operates as a geographical metonym, referring to immigrants and their descendants from what we now call the “greater” Middle East (itself a relatively recent concept), but which in common usage includes plenty of non-Arab ethnic groups. This referential problem has roots in US immigration policy, which often grouped migrants from the Ottoman Empire together regardless of ethnicity, language, religion, or specific place of origin, and it is exacerbated by the neocolonial elision of Arab, Middle Easterner, and Muslim in an in/visible monolith often with little determinate content other than politically and racially reified anti-Americanism. But by the 1960s, catalyzed by the ethnic revival, incited by the occupation of Palestine, and galvanized by increasing US involvement in the Middle East and growing Arab and Muslim social marginalization at home, “Arab American” was developing into a strategy of pan-ethnic group self-consciousness. An Arab American literary study that imagines itself simply as the representational deputy of ethnic history will be unable to pursue a critical institutional analysis of this emergence. Rather than belonging primarily to the history of a [nationalized] ethnic subject—Arab immigration or Diaspora, for example—Arab American literature can 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, it is less genetically dependent on its self-evidence than it offers ironic analytical perspective on that subject’s normalization. Arab American literature’s frequent self-referentiality offers literary studies a powerful criticism of the disciplinary powers of ethnic ideology.