Creative belonging : the Qiang and multiethnic imagination in modern China / Yanshuo Zhang.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Zhang, Yanshuo, author.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Series:

China understandings today.

China Understandings Today

Language:

Chinese

English

Subjects (All):

Qiang (Chinese people).

Belonging (Social psychology)--China--21st century.

Belonging (Social psychology).

Multiculturalism--China--21st century.

Multiculturalism.

Ethnic groups--China--History.

Ethnic groups.

China, Southwest--Ethnic relations--Political aspects.

China, Southwest.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (285 pages) : illustrations (chiefly color), maps

Other Title:

Qiang and multiethnic imagination in modern China

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2026.

Language Note:

In English, with some text in Chinese scripts or romanized.

Summary:

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."

Contents:

Imagining the “Qiang” in Chinese National Narratives and Minority Scholarly Debates

Visualizing the “Qiang” in Cinema, the Built Environment, and Tourism

Reconstituting the “Qiang” in Literary Voices and Cultural Activism in the Himalayas.

Notes:

Title from eBook information screen..

Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-285).

Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

0-472-90536-8

OCLC:

1524306474

Access Restriction:

Open Access Unrestricted online access