New Publication: Creative Belonging: The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China by Yanshuo Zhang is forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press on January 12, 2026. Pre-order of the book is available and UM Press is offering significant holiday sales: https://press.umich.edu/Books/C/Creative-Belonging3 . The book is also available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
This book has about thirty full-color images and is printed on high-quality matte-glossy paper similar to an art catalogue or art book at a very affordable price. It offers a luxurious and intimate view of contemporary ethnic minority life in China. It would make for an excellent holiday read. The book’s wide-ranging sources, evidence, and visual aids make it an excellent textbook and can be easily adopted for any courses on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, culture, film, history, or other types of China- and Asia-related courses.
The author of the book, Yanshuo Zhang, is Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Literatures at Pomona College. She is the Principal Investigator of the national winner of the Inaugural Luce/ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) Collaborative Grant in China Studies in 2024. Titled “Resituating Humanistic Pedagogy in China Studies: Incorporating Ethnic Minority Literary and Cultural Productions into North American College Classrooms,” the winning project is an interdisciplinary, cross-institutional project that aims to build understanding of ethnic diversity and minority voices within China by developing a multicultural China studies curriculum that is integrated with global studies on race, ethnicity, indigeneity, and identity. Prof. Yanshuo Zhang is leading a group of scholars, translators, artists, and ethnic minority and indigenous collaborators in mainland China and Taiwan on developing a collective database that would offer innovative and original materials on teaching multiethnic China for the English-speaking and multilingual audience internationally.
Advance praises for Creative Belonging:
“Creative Belonging is a fascinating study of the Qiang in contemporary China that challenges disciplinary boundaries by adopting an interdisciplinary methodology—including cultural anthropology, ethnography, cultural and media studies, ethnic studies, and literary criticism. As such it will interest scholars and students in a wide range of areas from cultural ethnography to borderland studies, from media studies to socialist affect studies.”– David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University
“This theoretically nuanced study draws on a range of different types of material, including films, literary writings, and ethnographic observation, to reflect on how the Qiang are currently perceived and how they perceive themselves, while at the same time reflecting on the ways in which ethnonational identity has been constituted in modern and premodern China.”– Carlos Rojas, Duke University
“Yanshuo Zhang defies disciplinary boundaries to introduce a variegated array of Qiang cultural texts and practices, advancing the argument that the Qiang ethnic group has been constructed ambivalently as both constitutive of and other to Chineseness. Rolling out concepts such as ‘ethnographic poetics,’ ‘fluid indigeneity,’ and ‘discursive self-fashioning,’ this lushly illustrated study illuminates the complex processes and struggles that go into the creative imagining of a Chinese national identity that is decidedly multiethnic.”– Louisa Schein, Rutgers University
Book overview:
China is a multicultural country home to fifty-five ethnic minority groups, yet due to linguistic and cultural barriers many of these groups remain understudied or unknown in the West. The Qiang, one of modern China’s officially recognized ethnic minorities, is also China’s longest-standing ethnoracial identity marker that has existed since the earliest recorded history of China. Creative Belonging investigates the formation and evolution of the Qiang as a people, a concept, and a cultural history in China. It further examines how the contemporary Qiang ethnic group interacts strategically with mainstream Chinese society, challenging the historically entrenched hierarchies between the sociocultural “centers” of China and its ethnic “peripheries.”
This book is based on years of ethnographic and textual-archival research in the Himalayan regions of southwest China, where the contemporary Qiang group resides. Drawing on a diverse range of official and local political discourses and previously unstudied literary, historiographical, and cinematic works, Yanshuo Zhang illuminates how the Qiang have carved out spaces of “creative belonging” within the parameters of multiculturalism in contemporary China. Rooted in ethnographic and textual-archival research, the book presents original materials produced by Qiang indigenous writers, scholars, artists, grassroots village cultural activists, and entrepreneurs at both the local and the global levels. Creative Belonging invites readers to rethink ethnicity and national belonging in China by centering minority groups’ efforts to expand the meanings and implications of “Chinese culture.”
Book website: https://press.umich.edu/Books/C/Creative-Belonging3