In this panel, we aim to interrogate traditional boundaries between literary and cultural forms produced in the Arab Middle East, on the one hand, and those produced in established diasporic outposts, within traditionally “hyphenated” affiliative configurations (Arab-American, British-Arab, Arab-Australian) on the other, as well as the academic configurations, (delineations of departments, teaching curriculum, fields of scholarship) that have developed around these delineated spheres. In the past, supported in part by immigration patterns, it seemed self-evident to make a clear-cut distinction between these spheres, with the former produced in Arabic by people born and unambiguously residing in the Middle East, and the latter produced in English by people born, raised and unambiguously residing in established diasporic locations in English-speaking countries. In fact, to this day in the U.S., Title VI governmental funding of activities sponsored by Middle East Studies centers, includes the stipulation that it will not fund “diasporic” academic or cultural activities, only “Middle Eastern” ones, assuming the two are mutually exclusive and completely distinct. However, in more recent decades, patterns of immigration and “settlement” between the Arab Middle East and its diasporic outposts have been far less stable, uni-directional, or linear in nature, as have people’s concomitant linguistic, cultural, and other affiliative patterns. These circumstances, combined with increasingly transnational patterns of cultural movement, expression and consumption (facilitated both by movement of culture-makers themselves, as well as by multiple virtual forms of connectivity and exchange), have in turn given rise to a far more fluid and transnational configuration of Arab / Arab-hyphenated cultural production. This extends to include imaginative as well as physical transnational movement, in which the “homeland” is reconfigured from afar in various ways, including nostalgic and/or revisionary. In our panel, we hope to engage in a broader theoretical dialogue about these boundaries and the nature of transnational cultural production, through each panelist’s analysis of specific examples – literary and artistic works, or cultural practices – that in distinct ways show how these boundaries are often more porous, flexible and interpenetrating than the rigid manner in which they are typically construed. Specific sources examined include works by Wafaa Bilal, Randa Jarrar, Annemarie Jacir, Etel Adnan, Suheir Hammad, Diana Abu Jaber, Doris Bittar and Sama al-Shaibi, as well as transnational formations among Palestinian communities in Britain and Australia.