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To take a slight different tack than the legitimate dismissal of China as a settler-colonial state ... this has been building up for decades now in academia. How? A very partial genealogy, privileging Australia and Palestine:
In the 1960s and 1970s and into the 1980s, a materialist-inflected or anti-colonial Marxist analysis dominated the analysis of settler societies. On the one hand, the of Palestine, this came from Fayez Sayegh & others, nationalist anti-colonialist anti- Zionists
While in the 1970s and 1980s this took a more Marxist turn with the work of Ghassan Kanafani, Nahla Abdo, & Rachelle Taqqu, in line with the ascension of Marxism as a tool of analysis and resistance
In Australia, this emerged as an analysis of settler-capitalism by Phil McMichael and Donald Denoon
Phil is my adviser and his book is awesome
However, to be sure a "turn" towards the holistic analysis of settler-capitalism & the coeval disintegration and resistance indigenous societies would have been important, but did not really occur as this work of all stripes reached its state of the art amidst
Or in the lead up to the intellectual and world-systemic counter-revolution of 1989-1991, a major inflection point for development outcomes, and intellectual work
Settler colonial studies then had a complex rebirth, in part moored to its emergence amongst Palestinians which honed its political cutting edge, in part as academic labor from academics in Australia and Italy loosely formed in subaltern studies work
* This* resurrection was a settler-colonial studies which, although in front of a fork in the road intellectually-politically, came to be at least heavily influenced by Patrick Wolfe & his epigones
In contrast to earlier work, and even other contemporaneous work by e.g. Amiya Kumar Bagchi, this work often severed settler- colonialism from a western-centered process of accumulation on a world scale, producing cores, peripheries, and the global color line
Note this work is different from the ebbs and flows of what should have been a sister discipline, indigenous studies across the fourth world
Instead, settler colonialism become a modular and doppelgänger-like "process of elimination" severed from imperialism and capitalism, and so severed from the anti- colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist National struggles which had held knowledge production accountable
Having become a floating Weberian logic, an ideal-type waiting to be plopped onto this or that process of state formation, it was only logical for Western anarchists declaiming "all states R bad" to decide Chinese state formation was also settler colonial
/done
