What makes Arabic literature, Arabic? Casting critical new light on area-based approaches, this comparative study tracks the diverse literary practices in Arabic and French that, during and after decolonization, writers on both sides of North Africa and the Middle East used to found a transregional literary system. Influenced by anti-colonial Arab nationalism, they mapped this literary system's imaginative and circulational scale according to the experience that they believed decolonial literature must represent and amplify: a shared political experience they called “Arab.” As it develops the first account of transregional scale between Morocco and Iraq, and between national and world literatures, this study shows that a major expression of twentieth-century Arabic literature produced itself as a set of print culture practices, literary themes, and interpretive norms in response to evolving ideas of Arab experience and emancipation.