This talk will contribute towards revisiting and re-envisioning the borders and parameters of Asian American, Arab American, and SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) studies. In doing so, it highlights the interventional role that anti-racist and transnational feminist critique plays in rethinking the histories and current formulations of these interconnected fields of study. To pursue such an analysis, Fadda examines specific cases of transnational solidarity movements and anti-racist feminist critique that push against what I identify as the US state's recurrent and strategic conflation of illegality, terrorism, and immigration in its depiction and treatment of racialized and minoritized communities in the US and beyond.Carol W.N. Fadda is Associate Professor in the English Department at Syracuse University, where she is also affiliated faculty in the Women's and Gender Studies Department. She holds a PhD in American Literature from Purdue University, and a BA and MA in English from the American University of Beirut. Her research and teaching interests extend to American Studies, critical race and ethnic studies, Arab American studies, women's and gender studies, and transnational SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) studies. Her first bookContemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging(NYU Press 2014) engages an array of Arab American literary and visual texts from the 1990s onwards that contest the conceived boundaries of the US nation-state and transform hegemonic forms of national membership and citizenship. She is the recipient of an NEH summer grant, a Future of Minority Studies Fellowship, a Syracuse University Humanities Center Fellowship, and a graduate teaching award from Syracuse University's graduate school. Most recently, she has been the co-recipient of Mellon Foundation's inaugural Higher Learning grant on race and racialization in the US in support of the "Black/Arab Relationalities: Confronting Racism, Narrating Solidarities" initiative. Her essays on questions related to gender, race, ethnicity, war trauma, cross-racial solidarities, and transnational belonging have appeared in a variety of journals and edited collections. She is currently completing her second book manuscript, titledCarceral States and Dissident Citizenships: Narratives of Resistance in an Age of "Terror."Fadda serves as the book series editor of the Critical Arab American Studies series, published by Syracuse University Press.