Creative Belonging: The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China

This talk is based on Professor Yanshuo Zhang's new book, Creative Belonging: The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China (University of Michigan Press, January 2026). 

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. It illuminates how a small ethnic minority group known today as the "Qiang" in China's Himalayan regions have carved out spaces of "creative belonging" in their daily practice, cultural productions, and self-representations within the parameters of multiculturalism in globalizing China. 

Creative Belonging crisscrosses multiple humanistic fields, such as literature, history, visual culture, media studies, and anthropology, to propose an interdisciplinary, multiethnic new scholarly paradigm to incorporate China and the Asia Pacific worlds into the global studies of race, ethnicity, and identity. In this talk, Professor Zhang will present her innovative research methodologies that combine ethnographic fieldwork with textual-archival research in the minority regions of China.

About the speaker:

Yanshuo Zhang is Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Literatures at Pomona College, California. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of Asia whose research lies at the intersections of literature, history, visual culture, and anthropology. She is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the singular national winner of the Inaugural Luce/ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) Collaborative Grant in China Studies, titled "Resituating Humanistic Pedagogy in China Studies: Incorporating Ethnic Minority Literary and Cultural Productions into North American College Classrooms." 

Professor 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. This project, as well as her new book, aims to bring to light the creative cultural endeavors made by China's non-Han minority groups, including literature, cinema, ethnographic documentaries, and folk cultural heritage. 

Professor Zhang grew up in Sichuan, one of the most multiethnic and culturally diverse provinces of China.