This panel explores how immigrant and multiethnic writers in the U.S. (re)generate identity and cultural belonging through literature, language, and storytelling, focusing on experiences of (un)belonging, displacement, and fractured selfhood.

What does it mean to become when belonging has always been conditional or withheld altogether? This panel explores how immigrant and multiethnic writers in the U.S. narrate identity as a layered, unstable process shaped by displacement, language, and cultural fragmentation. The title “(Un)Belonging and Becoming” captures the paradox of diasporic experiences: the desire for inclusion in a nation that demands assimilation, while denying full acceptance; the necessity of building selfhood from fractured or erased inheritances. “Belonging” here is interrogated not as arrival, but as a contested space shaped by race, displacement, language, and memory. “Becoming” speaks to the imaginative, political, and emotional labor of those whose subjectivity must be constructed against the grain of dominant cultural legibility.

Expanding on the NeMLA’s theme of (Re)generation, this panel considers how writers respond to the instability of identity and tension not only by naming it, but by rewriting it. For diasporic and displaced subjects, identity is not merely inherited; it must be actively and repeatedly renegotiated, remade, or reimagined across generations, geographies, and languages in the face of cultural fragmentation, inherited trauma, and systemic unbelonging. This panel is interested in how writers use literature, language, and cultural production to reclaim erased histories, reinvent narratives of self, and construct alternative modes of belonging.

This panel aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue across ethnic studies, literary studies, and cultural criticism to better understand how literature challenges dominant narratives of who belongs and who does not, and welcomes interdisciplinary, multiethnic, and intersectional approaches that address topics including (but not limited to):

• Regenerating selfhood from fractured, hybrid, or silenced identities
• Narrative as a site of resistance, reimagination, or cultural survival
• Language and voice as tools of reinvention or disruption
• The politics of visibility, unbelonging, and identity categorization
• Generational shifts in diasporic identity and cultural belonging

If interested, please submit a 250-500 word proposal and a brief bio by the deadline of September 30th, 2025.

Paper proposals must be submitted via NAMLA's online system:

https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/login

From the list of sessions, choose session number 21848, “(Un)Belonging and Becoming: (Re)generating Identity and Cultural Reinvention”

More information about the conference can be found at NAMLA's conference website:

https://www.nemla.org/convention.html

Please note that this panel will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me Wenyuan Wang (wenyuan.wang@tufts.edu)