Mahjar literature – and particularly the writing of women in the mahjar – cannot be fully understood from within the narrow confines of national borders. Like the individual migrants themselves, mahjar literature traveled. Theirs was a “world in motion” (FN 1) that reflected the transnational and multilingual character of the Arab world during the nah?a, or Arabic literary enlightenment of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this period, readers and writers of Arabic literature and journalism interacted in the vast geographic and textual “spaces” opened up by the rapidly expanding print culture of the Arabic-speaking world. In their published works, Karam and her literary “sisters” – both Christian and Muslim – on four continents wrestled with a host of ideas, including marriage customs, women’s roles in society, education, the Arabic language, and the politics of westernization in the Arab-Islamic world, and they did so using newly emerging literary forms and styles. For example, while the works of Levantine immigrant writer ‘Af?fa Karam (1883-1924) were originally published in New York, her work was being republished across the Atlantic, in Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria. In 1913, when Karam founded her women’s periodical Majallat al-‘?lam al-jad?d al-nis?’iyya (The New Women’s World) in New York, she described it as the “literary daughter” of Fat?t al-sharq (Young Woman of the East), a newspaper founded several years earlier by the Cairo-based Levantine woman writer, Lab?ba H?shim (1882-1952). A consideration of little known works by diasporic Arab women writers in North and South America at the first half of the twentieth century reveals a dynamic web of connections – both literal and textual – linking women writers throughout the mahjar and beyond. This paper will investigate this neglected body of work in order to piece together the unfinished tapestry of a transnational feminist genealogy of Arab women writers during the nah?a. 1. Arjun Appadurai. “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology,” in Richard G. Fox, Ed. Recapturing Anthropology. (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991), 61.