The papers collectively address how the diasporic subject is articulated through language, literature, and cinema. In "The Hitching Post: Myth in the Chinese Diaspora," Dr. Xiamara Hohman explores how the poets, Li-Young Lee and Jenny Xie, use myth as a "hitching post" to set themselves against the "rootless" tension of historical trauma into a metaphorical language that generates meaning where traditional discourse fails. This search for stable ground is mirrored in Wendy Gokhool’s analysis, "A Modernist Perspective, from Ezra Pound and T.S Eliot to Melvin Tolson and the Black Arts Movement." Gokhool explores how African American writers navigated the friction between high-art forms and diverse socio-economic vernaculars to negotiate a hybrid space of (un)belonging and double consciousness.

The panel extends this conversation to visual media and reclamation of history. Through an investigation of Black Italian documentary filmmaking, Guzman displays how filmmakers like Fred Kuwornu use an "internal gaze" to discuss colonial amnesia and the legal constraints of jus sanguinis. By connecting modern racial discourse to lesser known European archives, films such as Blaxploitalian and We Were Here re-position Blackness as a foundational element of the national identity rather than a recent or external arrival.

This panel combines literary and cinematic analysis to redefine (un)belonging as an active act of political resistance and self-representation rather than a state of exclusion. By examining how creators "mark" their presence through creative practice, the presenters demonstrate how marginalized voices subvert dominant national narratives to assert their right to a complex, modern identity.