Constructing an Imagined Community of Manchu-Futurism in Fiction and Art

Liang, Helun(Jiayang) and Gere, Charlie and Jones, Nathan (2026) Constructing an Imagined Community of Manchu-Futurism in Fiction and Art. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

My project, Manchu Futurism, proposes an art movement to reappraise what the Manchu ethnic identity might mean in future China. Through my work, viewers experience Manchu’s past, current, and future visions and are encouraged to appreciate different opportunities for the cohesion and re-vitalisation of our cultural community. The project includes a thesis, a fiction and a series of visual artworks. The fiction and artwork are displayed in offline exhibitions and online digital archives. I argue that the essence of the future Manchu community is not just about staying in a mutual space or close kinship but is about having a similar sense of ethnic identification. In Benedict Anderson’s view, a community is identified by how it is imagined(Anderson 1991, p.6), and media, like printed media, is necessary for creating a community out of imagined ideas (Anderson 2016, p.247-264). In my use of this concept, the approach of imagining a community is connected to different ‘monads’ from Manchu history. Walter Benjamin describes monads as compressions of time and experience into singular fragments that contain the energetic potential to connect past and future possibilities (Leslie 2024, p.1). Building on Anderson’s notion that communities are imagined among producers and consumers of culture and Benjamin’s monads that can project the future from active engagement in the past, Manchu Futurism aims to transcend Manchu culture’s historical decline and geographical dispersion through art practice. The first part of my thesis shows my research on Manchu history and how Manchu culture evolved through different periods at the apex and periphery of Chinese power. The second part analyses various types of communities. It interprets how artwork becomes the appropriate medium to create the imagined Manchu community, like the role of print media in Anderson’s model. In Anderson’s theory of imagined community, print media offers a distinctive understanding of time, which challenges the Western linear time philosophy (Anderson 1991, p.23). Print, he suggests, can create a simultaneous time experience among the members of an imagined community – in my work, print and digital reproduction and networks are both deployed in this sense. I compare the simultaneity of networked media with Benjamin’s notion of monads and Messianic time—an idea suggesting creative methods that compress experience into meaningful encounters with the past (Agamben 2005, p.25). The chapter explains why the history of the Manchu is crucial to revealing its future. The third part of my thesis focuses on the idea of Messianic time and monads in the art field (Adorno 1998, p.310). In conjunction with my descriptions of Italian Futurism and Afrofuturism in the fourth part, I demonstrate that Manchu Futurism draws from a similar methodology to Afrofuturism (Eshun 2003, p.288-289), challenging Western-centric time philosophies and reactivating local and historical customs, identities and narrative forms to develop a distinctive vision of the future in which this ethnicity has self-recognition. The fifth part of the thesis mainly discusses and interprets the core concept of Manchu futurism and my practical component of the project (fiction and artwork).