This paper explores how the figure of Scheherazade from The Thousand and One Nights is appropriated, reconfigured, and creatively subverted in the works of Arab American women writers such as Mohja Kahf (Emails from Scheherazad), Susan Muaddi Darraj (Scheherazade’s Legacy), and Alia Yunis (“My Arabian Superheroine” and The Night Counter). In analyzing the contrasting ways in which each of these writers reimagines the figure of Scheherazade in her work, this paper argues that Scheherazade occupies a productive if problematic site for negotiating Arab American literary interventions within Arab and American contexts. As the quintessential model of female agency within a highly mobile cross-cultural text that has undergone multiple recensions and translations by both Arab storytellers and European translators over several centuries, Scheherazade occupies a contested, multilayered cross-cultural site of representation that foregrounds the relationships between power, sexuality, narration, and cultural geography. As such, Scheherazade offers Arab American women writers a risky avenue of access for negotiating their literary presence amidst gendered, national, linguistic, and transnational flows of cultural production. In examining how various Arab American women writers reconstruct the figure of Scheherazade, this paper also situates their efforts within the contested spaces of Middle East studies, American studies, ethnic studies, and world literature studies. In so doing, it draws on the work of Ella Shohat, who views Arab American studies not only “in relation to both ethnic studies and area studies,” but also as “transcend[ing] a nation-state analytical framework” (46). It also responds to Wai Chee Dimock’s call for viewing American literature as “a complex tangle of relations … better seen as a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures” (3). This paper thus highlights the ways in which such reconfigurations participate in a process of redefinition that not only reclaims Arab women’s agency within American contexts but also redefines the spaces of literary production and transnational flows of cultural exchange within, among, and between gendered, national, linguistic, and academic boundaries of the Arab world and the United States. References Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Shohat, Ella. "The Sephardi-Moorish Atlantic: Between Orientalism and Occidentalism." Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora. Eds. Alsultany, Evelyn and Ella Shohat. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2013. 42-62.