# Generational racial formation and transnational belonging  
While Belly presents us with a stylistic depiction of how blacknesses might be imagined as coeval yet not coextensive, this is not only about style. Popular cultural representations are also diasporic resources that both reflect and re-imagine the implications of a history of black Atlantic circulations, a history whose parameters have been shaped by geopolitical and economic concerns that have changed over time. As a result, generation is a critical analytic tool through which to investigate transnational and racial subjectivities because it gives us a way to situate expressions of racial solidarity and difference within the context of changing relationships among political structures, labour opportunities, and socio-economic mobility. For example, we know that relationships among West Indian immigrants in the United States and African Americans have always oscillated between cooperative and tense because of the changing class composition of West Indian migrant pools, the broader political economy of labour surrounding migration streams, and more general waves of nativism in American society (Watkins-Owens, 1996). But if current processes of globalization have changed the ways people conceptualize national community, and if new conceptualizations of what makes up the national space are also shaped by and shape new understandings about racial community and belonging, then we must also identify not only the kinds of resources upon which different generations of people draw to co-produce new ideas about race and nation, but also the ways generational cohorts imagine and mobilize the concept of 'resources' itself in different ways.