While Belly attempts to portray the complexity of diasporic interrelationships, the film's conclusion recentres the African American narrative it starts with, and as a result, it does not delineate a more complicated sense of generational transitions within African Americanness and Caribbean Americanness that are not bound by geography. Instead, it reproduces a notion of hard and fast intradiasporic difference and clear territorial separations. This is because figures like the Notorious B.I.G., KRS One, and Busta Rhymes - hip-hop paragons who were either born in Jamaica themselves, or whose parents were - are missing from the cultural landscape of Belly. These figures occupy the liminal space of Caribbean Americanness, and embody the overlap among national, transnational, and racial subjectivities. By side-stepping a deeper rendering of these (ultimately, very intimate) relationships, Hype Williams (who himself grew up in Queens with his Oklahoman father and Honduran mother) stops short of fully engaging the ways new resources have been created in and through the processes of African American/Afro-Caribbean identity formation among second-generation West Indian Americans. Had the film highlighted - rather than erased - these sorts of connections, it might have more fully mined the popular cultural networks it introduces for emergent generational trends within diasporic relationships. In this way, it could have more fully embodied what performance studies scholar Thomas DeFrantz has argued is Williams' 'afrofuturist' directorial style - a visual conceptualization of distended time and space. For DeFrantz, this is a style that, in the case of his videos, blurs the 'normative tyrannies of gender and sexuality' (DeFrantz, 2003). Here, it might also have blurred the tyrannies of national and cultural boundaries.