Abstract
This article reconceptualizes antiblackness as modernity's historical a priori: a foundational yet historically contingent epistemic condition that structures what modernity can know, value, and render intelligible. Moving beyond relational theories, racial capitalism, postcolonial/decolonial sociology, and Afropessimist ontological closure, it develops a synthetic framework centered on David Marriott’s concept of effacement. Reading Marriott alongside Michel Foucault’s historical a priori, Émile Durkheim's sacred/profane distinction, and Walter Benjamin's profane illumination, the article theorizes antiblackness as a generative epistemic force that continually recalibrates modern categories of humanity, rationality, and social order. Empirical illustrations from East Asia and Iran—regions often regarded as peripheral to Atlantic slavery—show that antiblackness functions as a global epistemic architecture, structuring modern coherence even where Black presence is minimal, imagined, or erased. Reframing antiblackness as an epistemic condition rather than a relational problem renews antisociological critique and expands space for reimagining sociological inquiry and modernity's possible futures.
Sociology has long struggled to apprehend antiblackness at the depth at which it operates. Even its most influential frameworks—racial formation (Omi and Winant, 1994), structural racism (Bonilla-Silva, 1997, 2006), racial capitalism (Melamed, 2011, 2015; Robinson, 2021), and postcolonial/decolonial sociology (Go, 2016; Meghji, 2021)—treat antiblackness as a relational phenomenon: a form of inequality, exclusion, or colonial domination among others. These approaches have generated indispensable analyses of racial hierarchy, yet they presuppose a coherent social field in which racial meanings and structures take shape. That presupposition limits their capacity to engage antiblackness as something more fundamental: a constitutive epistemic condition through which modernity organizes what can appear as social in the first place.
Moon-Kie Jung's call for antisociology makes this limitation explicit. Building on Patterson's (1982) theorization of social death and Hartman's (2016)critique of rendering the enslaved legible through categories such as the worker, Jung (2019) diagnoses racial slavery as an antisocial condition that exposes the limits of sociology's ordinary conceptualization of the social. Slavery, in this view, is not an intensified form of exploitation but a condition that throws sociological categories—labor, agency, domination, and sociality itself—into crisis. Vargas and Jung (2021) extend this challenge by theorizing antiblackness as constitutive of the Social and the Human, in conversation with Afropessimist accounts of Blackness, nonbeing, and social death. These interventions powerfully identify antiblackness as foundational and clarify why relational frameworks remain insufficient. From this antisociological diagnosis, a different question follows: how are the limits Jung identifies produced, recalibrated, and rendered operative across different modern formations? This shift makes it possible to preserve antisociology's insistence on the incommensurability of antiblackness while examining its historical variability, epistemic operations, and global reach beyond the Atlantic frame.
A different orientation becomes possible by turning to David Marriott's recent account of effacement. In Of Effacement: Blackness and Non-Being (2023), Marriott develops an account of antiblack negation that can be read epistemologically as a dynamic and historically adaptive condition. Effacement names a continual process of negation—n’est pas—through which Blackness becomes perceptible only as the trace of its enforced disappearance. Rather than treating Blackness as an ontological void, this reading foregrounds antiblackness as a generative force that continually recalibrates modernity's epistemic boundaries, shaping the very terms through which categories such as humanity, reason, civilization, and the social become intelligible.
Thinking with effacement reorients central questions in sociological theory. The issue is not simply that existing frameworks mischaracterize antiblackness; it is that they operate at the wrong level of analysis. Antiblackness functions not primarily as a social relation but as a historical a priori: an epistemic condition that organizes what modernity can know, value, and render thinkable. This reframing addresses the limitations of antisociology while moving beyond the ontological stasis associated with Afropessimism. It also restores sociology's neglected epistemological vocation. The discipline has long oscillated between statistical modeling and the documentation of lived experience, often at the expense of more basic questions about how social life becomes thinkable in the first place. By conceptualizing antiblackness at the level of epistemic conditions, it becomes possible to interrogate the foundations that shape both sociological analysis and the political imaginations it authorizes. 1
Situating Marriott's intervention within a broader sociological architecture clarifies the stakes of this shift. Foucault’s ([1969] 2013) concept of the historical a priori provides methodological grounding by illuminating how historically contingent structures delimit the intelligibility of thought and representation. Durkheim’s ([1915] 1995) distinction between the sacred and the profane, refracted through Marriott, reveals how modern social coherence depends on symbolic distancing from a racialized profane anchored in the effacement of Blackness. Benjamin's ([1929] 1999) notion of profane illumination further highlights how the very margins produced through this negation disclose the contradictions and fragilities of modern epistemic orders. Seen in relation, these interventions make visible the epistemic foundation through which antiblackness organizes and destabilizes modernity.
This epistemic reframing becomes especially salient in sites often treated as peripheral to Atlantic slavery. Empirical illustrations from East Asia and Iran demonstrate that antiblack epistemologies shape national, civilizational, and modern imaginaries even where Black corporeal presence is minimal, imagined, or actively erased. These cases underscore that the force of antiblackness is not demographic but epistemic: modernity recalibrates itself through the negation of Blackness irrespective of local histories of slavery or racialization. Their geographical and historical distance from the Atlantic makes visible the global reach and constitutive depth of antiblackness as an organizing principle of the modern.
These theoretical and empirical interventions advance the claim that antiblackness constitutes modernity's historical a priori—a dynamic and generative epistemic condition that produces the coherence of modern social and intellectual orders. Recognizing antiblackness at this level transforms sociology's analytic object and political imagination by revealing the historical conditions that render the social thinkable and by opening conceptual space for forms of social life no longer anchored in the continual effacement of Blackness. What follows first evaluates the limits of dominant sociological frameworks, then develops Marriott's theory of effacement as an alternative conceptualization of antiblackness, situates this framework through engagements with Foucault, Durkheim, and Benjamin, and finally illustrates its global purchase through analyses of East Asia and Iran.
From Relational Theories to Antisociology: Reframing Antiblackness
Moon-Kie Jung's antisociological critique sharply challenges sociology's capacity to theorize racial slavery and antiblackness, exposing the discipline's fundamental epistemological limits. In “The Enslaved, the Worker, and Du Bois's Black Reconstruction” (2019), Jung argues that racial slavery constitutes an extreme antisocial condition that lies beyond sociology's self-defined boundary: the social. Sociology, he contends, persistently misrecognizes the rupture slavery represents by translating it into familiar categories of labor exploitation or domination. Drawing on Orlando Patterson's notion of “social death” (1982) and Saidiya Hartman’s critique of rendering the enslaved legible as workers (2016), Jung insists that slavery is not a social relation or a variant of exploitation but a foundational antisocial condition—one that compels sociology to reconsider its core assumptions, concepts, and methodological commitments.
Despite Jung's critique, contemporary sociological frameworks continue to approach race through relational paradigms. Omi and Winant's racial formation theory (1994) has been central to sociological understandings of race, emphasizing its dynamic, historically contingent, and politically contested character. Their notion of “racial projects” captures how racial meanings and social structures are mutually constituted, linking interpretation to institutional effect and thereby accounting for the continual production of racial categories and hierarchies. This framework moves decisively beyond biological essentialism by highlighting the social processes through which race acquires meaning and material force. Yet it ultimately remains tethered to a relational conception of the social—one that presumes a coherent social field in which actors retain minimal standing, recognized capacities, and meaningful avenues for interaction.
Similar limitations appear in Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's structural racism framework (1997, 2006), which powerfully reframes racism as embedded within racialized social systems rather than as prejudice or individual bias. Bonilla-Silva argues that racial structures are historically produced systems that differentially allocate social, economic, political, and symbolic resources. His notion of “racialized social systems” identifies race as a structural principle shaping interactions, relationships, and outcomes across institutions (2006:9). Yet despite its analytic force in revealing institutionalized racial inequality, this approach remains fundamentally relational, presuming a coherent social field through which racial dynamics unfold. It therefore cannot fully apprehend forms of antiblackness that exceed relational logics or unsettle the very coherence of the social domain.
Racial capitalism scholarship (Robinson, 2021; Melamed, 2011, 2015) powerfully illuminates the foundational entanglement of racialization and capitalist development. Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (2021) argues that capitalism has always been racial, showing how racial differentiation was integral to Europe's expansion and to the formation of global capitalism. Building on this insight, Jodi Melamed demonstrates how neoliberal multiculturalism reproduces racial violence and dispossession, legitimating inequality by sorting populations into gradients of value and disposability (2015). Yet despite these crucial interventions, racial capitalism scholarship largely situates antiblackness within economic logics of exploitation, differentiation, and exclusion. In doing so, it underestimates the epistemic rupture antiblackness represents—one that exceeds economic relations and anchors the very categories of labor, value, and humanity on which modern capitalism depends.
Postcolonial/decolonial sociology (Go, 2016; Meghji, 2021) broadens sociological discourse by interrogating the discipline's Eurocentric foundations and advancing epistemic pluralism. In Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (2016), Julian Go critiques the Eurocentric assumptions embedded in sociological theory and methodology, showing how colonial power shaped the discipline's intellectual architecture and marginalized non-Western epistemologies. He calls for the provincialization of Euro-American sociology and the development of a “global sociology” grounded in epistemic plurality. Ali Meghji (2021) similarly examines the coloniality of sociological knowledge production, arguing for a comprehensive decolonization of the discipline's theoretical and methodological practices. For Meghji, confronting sociology's entrenched epistemic hierarchies is necessary for integrating historically marginalized perspectives and rethinking how sociological knowledge is produced.
Yet despite these interventions, postcolonial/decolonial approaches often situate antiblackness within broader fields of colonial domination or epistemic injury, treating it as one modality of colonial violence rather than as a condition structuring modern social and epistemic orders. 2 Confronting antiblackness at this foundational level requires a different theoretical orientation—one that Afropessimism advances through its radical reconceptualization of Blackness as an ontological exclusion.
Ontological Abjection and Sociological Impasse: The Limits of Afropessimism
Afropessimism, articulated by scholars such as Frank Wilderson (2020, 2021), Jared Sexton (2011), and Christina Sharpe (2016), offers a major theoretical intervention by conceptualizing antiblackness as an ontological rupture. Yet mainstream sociology has been largely unwilling to confront this reconceptualization. At the center of Afropessimism is Orlando Patterson's idea of “social death” (1982), which names the condition of enslaved people rendered outside social recognition and human relationality. Patterson describes social death through three dimensions: natal alienation, the severing of genealogical and social ties; general dishonor, the permanent degradation and denial of social worth; and gratuitous violence, the constant exposure to force without protection or recourse. These dimensions mark slavery not as a social relation but as a condition of absolute subjection.
Wilderson (2020, 2021) extends Patterson by locating social death within the epistemological and ontological foundations of modernity. For Wilderson, Blackness is positioned outside the category of the Human itself; the gratuitous violence directed at Black people is not instrumental or contingent but essential to securing the coherence of the Human. Antiblackness is therefore an ontological exclusion, not a variant of oppression, marking Blackness as the limit against which humanity defines its integrity. Sexton (2011) likewise argues that antiblackness exceeds conventional frameworks of racial or ethnic discrimination, functioning instead as the structural condition that underwrites the boundaries of modern social and political orders. Sharpe (2016) further insists that antiblackness operates continuously in the “wake” of slavery, constituting an ongoing epistemological and ontological negation shaping contemporary subjectivities and institutions. These scholars distinguish antiblackness from relational forms of racism or coloniality, asserting its status as a foundational epistemic condition grounded in an ontological claim of irreparable exclusion. By foregrounding this rupture, Afropessimism compels sociology to reconsider its conceptual frameworks and methodological commitments in order to confront the constitutive violence antiblackness represents.
Despite its crucial theoretical interventions, Afropessimism's emphasis on ontological closure and irreparable exclusion introduces significant limits for sociological analysis, a tension especially clear in Wilderson's (2021:41) critique of the “ruse of analogy.” Wilderson argues that “the antagonist of the Black is the Human” (2021:39), marking an absolute division between Blackness and humanity itself. Analogies linking antiblackness to class exploitation, gender subordination, or colonial domination thus function, in his view, as a ruse: they misrecognize Black suffering by equating it with injustices from which nonblack subjects can seek redress or liberation. From this standpoint, antiblackness—not whiteness—constitutes the structuring limit of the Human, with Blackness positioned as the categorical outside against which humanity secures its coherence. This insistence on irreconcilability distinguishes Afropessimism from postcolonial/decolonial approaches, which typically situate Blackness as one modality of coloniality rather than as the foundational rupture organizing modern social and epistemic orders. Yet by asserting absolute nonrelation, Afropessimism narrows both analytic exploration and political imagination, risking a form of paralysis in which sociology is left with no conceptual traction for apprehending how antiblackness transforms across history or how new epistemic and social possibilities might emerge.
Vargas and Jung (2021) sharpen this antisociological challenge by theorizing antiblackness as constitutive of the Social and the Human. Drawing in part on Afropessimist insights, they distinguish antiblackness from racism and argue that Blackness marks the limit through which modern sociality and humanity take shape. This formulation powerfully identifies antiblackness as foundational, but its emphasis on incommensurability leaves less developed the question of how antiblackness operates as a historically variable epistemic process. Jung's earlier work (2019), drawing more directly on Saidiya Hartman's reconceptualization of agency, domination, and the constitutive violence of slavery—particularly her critique of rendering the enslaved legible as “workers” (Hartman, 2016:166)—is less a statement of Afropessimist ontology than a diagnosis of sociology's conceptual failure before racial slavery. In this account, slavery lies beyond the conceptual and methodological reach of the social, generating an antisociology oriented toward the limits of sociological reason. Although these works take distinct routes—one foregrounding antiblackness as constitutive of the Social and the Human, the other provincializing the social through the antisocial condition of slavery—they converge on a methodological impasse for historical sociology: antiblackness appears fundamentally incommensurable with social life, leaving limited conceptual space for analyzing its historical variability or epistemic operations. Recognizing this limitation does not diminish their force; it clarifies the need for a framework that preserves their emphasis on antiblackness's foundational role while avoiding both ontological fixity and the foreclosure of historical-epistemic analysis, enabling antiblackness to be theorized as historically contingent, dynamically reproduced, and epistemically generative.
Beyond Ontological Stasis: Marriott's Theory of Effacement
Recognizing the tensions and limits within both frameworks clarifies the need to move beyond Afropessimism's ontological closure while extending the critical insights of Jung's antisociology. David Marriott's Of Effacement: Blackness and Non-Being (2023) offers such an alternative by reframing antiblackness not as an ontology but as an active epistemic process: effacement. Marriott identifies historically adaptive forms of negation, countering Afropessimism's tendency toward conceptual paralysis and providing resources that complement and deepen Jung's critique.
Central to Marriott's theory is effacement, an active and continuous process of negation—"a crystallized phenomenon [that] passes beyond all finite summations” (Marriott, 2023:vii). Drawing on Fanon's assertion “le Noir n’est pas” (the Black is not), Marriott positions Blackness as a phenomenon that continually eludes stable representation, ontology, or essence. 3 Effacement, therefore, marks a departure from any fixed notion of being, locating Blackness beyond stable epistemic categories. It operates as a structural mechanism that installs a prior non-being—a n’est pas—that interrupts signification and renders Blackness perceptible only as the trace of its imposed erasure. By collapsing visibility and invisibility into a single epistemic condition, effacement forces Blackness to appear solely as the effect of the negation that constitutes it. Blackness, for Marriott, is not a stable ontology of non-being but a persistent disruption that exceeds any attempt at epistemic capture.
While effacement names an ongoing epistemic negation, the anchoring role Blackness comes to occupy in modernity was neither immediate nor inevitable. 4 Through the uneven consolidation of modern epistemic orders, the effacement of Blackness gradually crystallized into the anchor that stabilized emergent distinctions such as being/non-being, rational/irrational, and civilized/uncivilized. Antiblackness became modernity's generative limit condition not because it was fixed from the outset but because modernity increasingly required Blackness-as-negation to secure coherence within its evolving symbolic and epistemic architecture. Effacement, in this sense, marks a historical becoming: the moment when Blackness emerged as the indispensable zero point through which modernity came to know itself.
Marriott's innovation lies in recognizing that whenever Blackness is defined, categorized, or stabilized—even momentarily—it slips away, refusing conceptual closure. This epistemic slippage is central to his insight: Blackness is structured by dynamic negation and perpetual recalibration. It is negatively defined—not through any positive content, but through what it continually is not: the human. 5 Ontological fixity is therefore inadequate, for fixity presumes representational stability, something Blackness categorically refuses within modern epistemic orders.
What is negated in Marriott's framing is not merely Black identity or corporeality, but Blackness as a site of epistemic, ethical, and linguistic agency (Marriott, 2023). Blackness is foreclosed from the capacity to signify, originate knowledge, function as a variant of the human, or act as an ethical subject. Yet precisely through this negation, it becomes indispensable to the coherence of modernity's central categories. Marriott's interventions in literary theory show that attempts to locate an authentic voice or essence of Blackness invariably collapse into negation. What becomes legible as “Black” is always mediated by the epistemic demand that Blackness signify what must remain outside—what cannot be coherently represented or affirmed within modernity's symbolic order. And it is this negation that becomes foundational: Blackness must remain undefined so that categories such as civility, reason, or humanity may appear coherent.
Postcolonial and decolonial scholarship has made crucial interventions in recovering suppressed histories, voices, and epistemologies (Go, 2016; Meghji, 2021). Yet, as Marriott's theory of effacement makes clear, such recoveries often remain entangled in the epistemic structures they seek to unsettle. These approaches frequently presume that the tools of modernity—archive, language, narrative—can yield Black presence if redeployed differently. But the very possibility of recovery is conditioned by n’est pas: the structural negation of Blackness as epistemic incoherence. Efforts to restore presence may therefore reproduce the absence they aim to repair.
Effacement's significance, however, extends beyond negation. For Marriott, it operates as a generative negativity, shaping modern epistemic categories and consolidating into historically specific social arrangements. This generativity is neither nihilistic nor politically paralyzing. Rather, effacement functions as a persistent ethical–political interruption, unsettling normative frameworks and political imaginaries. By compelling ongoing ethical reflection rather than offering fixed solutions, effacement destabilizes settled notions of representation, redemption, or universal emancipation. Unlike Afropessimism's permanent antagonism, Marriott's effacement opens space for sustained ethical engagement and continuous political disruption.
Marriott's emphasis on historical adaptability provides crucial tools for tracing antiblackness across disparate geopolitical and historical settings. By conceptualizing antiblackness as historically contingent yet epistemically necessary to modernity, his account opens a path beyond Atlantic-centric frameworks. This approach enables rigorous analysis of how antiblackness recalibrates in contexts typically treated as peripheral to slavery, thereby expanding the analytical horizon of historical sociology. 6 Effacement thus opens new possibilities for examining the subtle epistemic mechanisms through which modernity secures knowledge, stabilizes social coherence, and renders institutional order intelligible globally.
Marriott's intervention also clarifies the relationship between effacement and Jung's antisociology. Whereas Jung (2019) diagnoses slavery as an antisocial condition that exceeds sociology's ordinary conceptualization of the social, Marriott allows this limit to be approached as a process of negation that continually shapes the social itself. Effacement renders the constitutive exclusion of Blackness historically traceable without reducing it to a social relation among others. In this sense, Marriott extends Jung's antisociological challenge in a historical and epistemological direction: the question is not only where sociological reason reaches its limit, but how that limit is produced, sustained, and recalibrated through antiblack negation. 7
Effacement thus addresses the ontological closure associated with certain Afropessimist formulations while also extending antisociology beyond diagnosis. It provides the conceptual means to analyze antiblackness as historically dynamic, generative, and foundational—amenable to rigorous historical inquiry without collapsing it into relational frameworks.
Ultimately, Marriott's theory of effacement enables historical sociology to conceptualize antiblackness as both foundational and fluid. Rather than overcoming Jung's antisociology, it builds from Jung's diagnosis of sociology's limits by asking how those limits become historically and epistemically operative. By foregrounding historical adaptability and epistemic generativity, effacement positions antiblackness as an active force that continually shapes modern social orders. To realize this potential, however, effacement must be placed in critical relation to sociological frameworks concerned with knowledge, symbolic boundaries, and epistemic disclosure. The following section therefore reads Marriott alongside Foucault's historical a priori, Durkheim's sacred/profane distinction, and Benjamin's profane illumination, not to restore canonical authority but to establish a sociological foundation for analyzing antiblackness as a generative epistemic force.
Sociologically Grounding Effacement: Integrating Foucault, Durkheim, and Benjamin
Foucault's Historical A Priori and Alignment With Marriott's Effacement
In The Archaeology of Knowledge ([1969] 2013), Michel Foucault introduces the concept of the historical a priori, understood as the historically contingent conditions of possibility that structure knowledge, thought, and representation within specific epochs. Unlike Kantian forms that are universal and timeless, Foucault foregrounds conditions that shift through practices, discourses, and epistemic transformations. These conditions regulate the emergence and dispersion of “statements” (énoncés), establishing the regularities that determine what can be articulated or understood. In this framework, epistemic change is marked not by linear development but by discontinuities and rupture.
Although Foucault did not theorize antiblackness, his methodological framework offers powerful tools for conceptualizing it as epistemologically foundational. Through a Foucauldian lens, antiblackness appears as modernity's historical a priori—structuring the conditions that determine what can be known, articulated, and understood about categories such as humanity, civilization, progress, and race. Modern epistemic formations rely on an antiblack logic for their coherence, generating the foundational distinctions through which these categories acquire meaning. Antiblackness is therefore not simply ideology, prejudice, or even a ‘social structure,’ but an epistemic condition that precedes and enables such structures, underwriting modernity's dominant intellectual paradigms and social configurations.
This use of Foucault should not be read as an effort to make antiblackness legible through the authority of Foucauldian theory. Rather, Foucault's historical a priori is mobilized because it offers a vocabulary for theorizing the historically specific conditions through which objects, statements, and categories become intelligible. Yet the argument developed here also inverts Foucault's account of race. In Foucault's work, race generally appears within the history of biopower as one technology of modern power and population regulation (Foucault, [1997] 2003). Here, antiblackness is not treated as one racial category produced by the modern episteme or as a secondary instrument of biopolitical rule. Rather, the modern episteme's capacity to distinguish between civilized and uncivilized, rational and irrational, valuable life and disposable life depends on a historically consolidated distinction between being and non-being—a distinction secured through the continual negation of Blackness. Antiblackness is therefore not an effect of biopolitical rationality but an epistemic condition that makes biopolitical rationality intelligible.
Identifying antiblackness as modernity's historical a priori does not imply that Blackness functioned as a coherent epistemic category in the emergent, still-forming classificatory regimes that preceded the consolidation of the modern episteme of race. As historians of race show, early modern taxonomies were heterogeneous and drew on diverse, often inconsistent logics (Wheeler, 2000). In Foucauldian terms, the epistemic role of Blackness becomes intelligible only retrospectively—once the modern episteme crystallizes and requires a zero point through which distinctions such as being/non-being and civilized/uncivilized can coherently operate. The aim is not to locate the precise moment when these disparate early classificatory logics coalesced into a racial episteme. Rather, following Foucault's archaeological method, the analysis reconstructs the epistemic condition modernity retrospectively requires for its coherence: an antiblack logic of effacement that subtends and stabilizes its fundamental categories.
Marriott's concept of effacement complements this Foucauldian framing by illuminating how antiblackness dynamically operates within modern epistemologies. By theorizing effacement as an active process of negation—n’est pas—Marriott (2023) shows how Blackness continually withdraws from stable representation, recalibrating epistemic boundaries in ways that echo Foucault's emphasis on historically specific conditions of possibility. His account thus provides a conceptual tool for extending Foucault's method to antiblackness, highlighting it as a dynamic force that continually reshapes modern knowledge systems.
The alignment between Marriott's effacement and Foucault's historical a priori carries important methodological implications for historical sociology. Foucault's archaeological approach enables the identification of the historical practices, discourses, and events through which epistemic boundaries are structured, destabilized, and reconstituted. Marriott's framework likewise foregrounds these dynamic processes, emphasizing the continual recalibration and negation central to antiblackness. In this alignment, the shifting historical processes through which antiblackness organizes and reconfigures modern epistemic and social orders become visible.
Integrating Marriott's effacement with Foucault's historical a priori equips sociology with a framework for analyzing how antiblackness is continually produced, contested, and reconfigured across historical contexts. In this light, antiblackness appears not as static or ontologically fixed but as a historically contingent, foundational epistemic condition that both organizes and unsettles modern systems of knowledge. Foregrounding processes of negation and epistemic recalibration makes visible the shifting operations through which antiblackness constitutes and reconstitutes modern categories, boundaries, and social formations. Building on this alignment, the focus now shifts to Émile Durkheim. His distinction between the sacred and the profane offers a powerful sociological grounding for conceptualizing how modernity constitutes itself through symbolic and epistemic boundaries. Reframed through Marriott's notion of effacement, Durkheim's insights clarify how antiblackness operates as a racialized structuring principle essential to modern social coherence and collective identity.
Durkheim's Sacred/Profane Distinction and Racialization Through Marriott's Effacement
Émile Durkheim's concept of the sacred and the profane, developed in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life ([1915] 1995), is treated here as part of an unfinished epistemological project: an effort to interrogate not only social life but the a priori conditions of thought. His sacred/profane distinction clarifies how societies constitute the epistemological foundations of collective life through symbolic differentiation. For Durkheim, social groups divide the world into two opposed realms: the sacred, set apart and invested with moral authority, and the profane, associated with the ordinary and routine. Sacredness does not derive from intrinsic properties; it emerges through collective emotional investment and symbolic distancing from the profane. Durkheim thereby addresses a fundamental epistemological question—how knowledge becomes possible—by showing that rituals, shared beliefs, and symbolic prohibitions continually reproduce the boundary between sacred and profane, generating and legitimizing the basic categories of representation, meaning, and social existence (Durkheim, [1915] 1995).
Extending Durkheim's logic through Marriott's concept of effacement racializes this epistemological framework. Effacement—an ongoing process of negation and withdrawal—reveals how Blackness functions as modernity's profane, the domain from which society must continually distance itself to generate and sustain the sacred categories at the core of its collective self-conception. In this Durkheimian framing refracted through Marriott, antiblackness figures as the continuous symbolic and epistemic negation upon which modern knowledge depends. Effacement thus underscores the indispensability of Blackness as the negative epistemological condition that enables modernity to apprehend itself as rational, enlightened, and civilized.
At the same time, this use of Durkheim should not be read as a return to canonical authority. The aim is not to make antiblackness legible through Durkheim, but to read Durkheim through Marriott's theory of effacement. His account of symbolic differentiation is useful precisely because it can be inverted: rather than adding Blackness as one profane category among others, this reading shows how modern social coherence depends on a racialized profane that sociology itself could not fully recognize.
Just as Durkheim emphasizes that the sacred/profane distinction requires a concrete symbolic anchor to become socially operative, modernity's abstract binaries likewise depend on a specific negative referent. Whereas Durkheim identifies the totem as this anchoring object, Marriott shows that Blackness performs an analogous function—not as a positive symbol, but as a continually negated site of non-being. Blackness lends modern epistemological distinctions their necessary specificity through negative rather than positive presence. Its continual effacement ensures that categories such as civilized/uncivilized and being/non-being take on coherence and stability, even as Blackness itself resists ontological fixation.
To name Blackness as modernity's profane is to lay bare the sociological and epistemological architecture through which modernity secures its coherence. Modern societies secure their coherence, order, and legitimacy through ongoing acts of effacement, relegating Blackness to the profane domain to generate and preserve the epistemic foundations of modernity itself. This continuous symbolic distancing is not merely exclusionary; it is generative, producing and reaffirming the distinctions that sustain modern intellectual and social orders. Antiblackness thus functions not as a marginal or incidental phenomenon but as the foundational epistemic principle through which modern societies continually recalibrate their sacred categories—knowledge, rationality, humanity, morality, and civility.
Having shown how antiblackness operates through symbolic distancing within a Durkheimian framework refracted through Marriott, it becomes necessary to clarify how the profane—embodied by antiblackness—not only structures epistemic boundaries but also generates critical insights into modernity's internal contradictions. Walter Benjamin's notion of profane illumination provides precisely this perspective, emphasizing the epistemic possibilities that emerge from marginalized and negated spaces.
Walter Benjamin's Profane Illumination
Walter Benjamin's concept of profane illumination, introduced in “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” ([1929] 1999), names the critical insights generated from marginalized, excluded, or otherwise profane spaces. In contrast to Enlightenment epistemologies that privilege illumination grounded in sacred or authoritative positions, Benjamin foregrounds a materialist, anthropological form of insight that emerges from ordinary, overlooked, and abject experiences. Profane illumination thus inverts dominant epistemic hierarchies, insisting that transformative knowledge arises not from sites coded as elevated or pure but from the peripheries cast as insignificant or debased (Benjamin, [1929] 1999).
For Benjamin, profane sites offer vantage points from which the contradictions and concealed dependencies of the social order become most visible. This is precisely what makes Benjamin indispensable to the present synthesis: profane illumination provides a theory of epistemic insight generated from the very spaces modernity marks as marginal or debased—something neither Durkheim's symbolic order, nor Foucault's archive, nor Marriott's negation alone can supply. These perspectives expose the constructed character of authorities and distinctions routinely naturalized as stable or inevitable. Profane illumination therefore treats marginality not as a deficit but as a site of epistemic disclosure from which modernity's contradictions and instabilities become newly perceptible.
Benjamin's account also clarifies the antisociological orientation at work here. Profane illumination does not invoke an external or transcendent vantage point; it disrupts the taken-for-granted categories that constitute the social from its underside. Antisociology operates similarly: it reveals sociology's dependence on antiblackness not from a position above the discipline, but from the very profane terrain that sociology disavows. Benjamin thus helps frame antisociology as a mode of epistemological interruption—a gesture that resonates with, though is not yet equivalent to, the radical ethical rupture Marriott later theorizes through the concept of revolutionary suicide (Marriott, 2023).
Bringing Benjamin into dialogue with Durkheim through Marriott's effacement racializes and deepens this insight. Although Durkheim himself does not address Blackness, his sacred/profane distinction offers a compelling analytic frame for understanding Blackness as modernity's profane—its necessary site of symbolic exclusion. Marriott's account of effacement clarifies how this exclusion operates epistemologically, continually recalibrating and destabilizing the boundaries through which modernity renders the world intelligible. Benjamin extends this synthesis by showing that the profane—embodied here by Blackness—is not only the negative ground of modern categories but also a privileged site from which their fragility, contingency, and constructedness become most visible. Profane illumination thus positions Blackness not merely as modernity's symbolic foil, but as a source of acute epistemological disclosure.
At the same time, the deployment of Benjamin here necessarily departs from Benjamin's own orientation. For Benjamin, profane illumination bears a redemptive charge: a flash of recognition arising from everyday detritus or outmoded forms that opens onto revolutionary possibility. Illumination, for him, is a spark of political futurity. In the antisociological framing developed here, however, profane illumination operates less as a redemptive spark than as a diagnostic fracture. It marks the fissures through which modernity's limits become perceptible—where coherence falters and its reliance on antiblack effacement is exposed. Just as this analysis inverts Durkheim's sacred/profane distinction and Foucault's historical a priori to reveal antiblackness as their enabling ground, it likewise reorients Benjamin: illumination becomes a mode of exposure rather than transcendence, revealing the impossibility of modernity's epistemological closure.
Having established profane illumination as a critical complement to Marriott's effacement—both refracted through a Durkheimian symbolic framework racialized by antiblackness—these strands converge to clarify how antiblackness furnishes the epistemic ground upon which modern coherence depends, while generating the contradictions and disclosures through which its limits become perceptible. From these fissures emerge the very conditions that make resistance, critique, and epistemic transformation possible.
The Generative Power of Antiblackness and Possibilities of Resistance
The theoretical synthesis developed thus far centers David Marriott's concept of effacement while reading Michel Foucault, Émile Durkheim, and Walter Benjamin through its disruptive force. These figures are not invoked as canonical authorities, nor as frameworks through which Marriott becomes legible. They are mobilized because their work addresses problems central to theorizing antiblackness as modernity's historical a priori: the historical delimitation of knowledge, the symbolic production of collective coherence, and the critical disclosures generated from profane or marginalized spaces. Refracted through effacement, however, these frameworks are inverted: antiblackness does not appear simply as an object neglected by the canon but as an epistemic condition that unsettles the canon's own categories from within.
These perspectives reveal antiblackness as not merely a mode of exclusion but as a generative force that produces and stabilizes the categories sustaining modern social coherence, even as it renders their fragility and contradiction perceptible. Blackness, as modernity's profane, becomes not only the locus of negation but also the vantage from which the constructed character of modern epistemological orders is most visible. This reframing advances Moon-Kie Jung's call for antisociology (Jung, 2019). By theorizing antiblackness as a historical-epistemic condition, it responds to the limits Jung identifies within relational frameworks that misrecognize antiblackness as simply another form of social domination. At the same time, by treating it as historically contingent rather than ontologically fixed, it avoids the political and analytical impasse associated with Afropessimism's static ontology, equipping historical sociology with conceptual tools for critical and transformative inquiry.
The tension between rupture and continuity in modernity becomes clearer in this synthesis. Whereas Foucault emphasizes epistemic discontinuities and Durkheim underscores the endurance of symbolic orders, Marriott's effacement and Benjamin's profane illumination reveal that modern epistemic shifts are neither absolute breaks nor seamless continuities, but ongoing recalibrations of the sacred/profane divide. Antiblackness thus emerges as structurally integral—continually reconfigured across history yet persistently foundational to the coherence of modern epistemological orders.
On the question of resistance, Marriott and Benjamin offer complementary yet distinct trajectories. Benjamin foregrounds the revolutionary potential of profane spaces, insisting that marginalized positions yield forms of insight capable of exposing contradictions and opening pathways for transformation. Marriott, drawing on Huey Newton while decisively departing from a political reading of his work, redefines revolutionary suicide as an ethical–epistemological refusal of the human. As he writes, revolutionary suicide names a form of death “more than suicide,” a surrender of the subject such that the very claim to being is ruptured—an act that exposes and destabilizes the epistemic order through which the human coheres (Marriott, 2023:262). Resistance emerges not in spite of the epistemic order shaped by antiblackness but from within it, drawing upon the disclosures generated through ongoing exclusion, marginalization, and negation.
Extending this insight, a kind of epistemological and disciplinary revolutionary suicide becomes necessary—refusing the inherited grounds of sociological reason in order to expose and unsettle the epistemic order that sustains it. By confronting the epistemic foundations that underwrite conventional sociological reason, the aim is not destruction but renewal. Like revolutionary suicide, this interruption of inherited frameworks seeks to make transformation possible, enabling sociology to reckon with antiblackness as modernity's constitutive epistemic condition. The antisociological orientation advanced here therefore performs its own act of disciplinary rupture—one directed toward survival and liberation—opening new epistemological and political possibilities for sociology's continued relevance.
Grasping antiblackness as both contingent and generative enables historical sociology to see it as an epistemological force that stabilizes modern knowledge systems even as it produces insights capable of unsettling them. Future inquiry can extend this orientation by tracing concrete moments of epistemic recalibration and exploring counter-epistemologies emerging from marginalized and negated spaces. Such sites illuminate transformative possibilities for reimagining modernity's dependence on antiblackness. The next section turns to empirical illustrations from East Asia and Iran, demonstrating how antiblack epistemologies structure modern coherence even where direct racial violence or Black corporeal presence appear absent.
Empirical Illustrations: Antiblackness in East Asia and Iran
Analyzing antiblackness through Marriott's lens of effacement shifts attention beyond the experiential register of suffering within the Black diaspora, illuminating antiblackness as a foundational epistemic logic that shapes categories, schemas, and historical memory—even in regions historically peripheral to Atlantic slavery. Examining East Asia and Iran—contexts often neglected in conventional sociological analyses—makes visible how antiblackness structures modern conceptions of civilization, nationhood, and humanity while continually recalibrating the epistemic frameworks through which these categories acquire coherence. These cases reveal effacement as an active, historically fluid epistemological process—producing social coherence through the systematic negation, distancing, and erasure of Blackness while manifesting differently across geopolitical and temporal contexts. The claim is primarily epistemological, but not institutionally detached: epistemic conditions shape the categories through which institutions classify populations, authorize histories, organize memory, and render some forms of presence or violence unintelligible. In Benjaminian terms, the relative marginality or apparent absence of Black corporeal presence in these contexts becomes epistemically illuminating rather than analytically incidental. Precisely because Blackness appears displaced, peripheral, or historically erased, these cases disclose the deeper contradictions and epistemic dependencies through which modernity organizes itself. Antiblackness thus emerges not as mere exclusion but as an epistemically generative force central to modernity across diverse global contexts.
East Asia: Epistemic Differentiation and Antiblackness
East Asian modernity continually recalibrates itself through symbolic and epistemic distancing from Blackness, establishing foundations rooted in antiblackness despite the absence of substantial Black corporeal presence. Drawing on historical sociology, Kim and Lee (2025) show how antiblack epistemic logics shaped dominant conceptions of civilization, progress, and nationhood across imperial Japan, semi-colonized China, and colonial Korea.
In imperial Japan, influential intellectuals such as Fukuzawa Yukichi depicted Africans and Blackness as inherently uncivilized, defining Japanese civilization and rationality through their symbolic opposition to Blackness. Rather than merely adopting Western racial hierarchies, Japanese thinkers reworked them through epistemic engagements centered on antiblackness, positioning Japan closer to—or potentially above—whiteness as the apex of global civilization. A similar dynamic unfolded in China, where figures such as Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei articulated visions of national identity and racial progress through explicit differentiation from Blackness. Liang's critique of American lynching paradoxically reinforced antiblackness by accepting racial hierarchy as given, while Kang imagined a future utopia predicated on racial purification, advocating the elimination of darker races through sterilization and intermarriage (Kim and Lee, 2025).
Colonial Korea likewise exemplifies epistemic recalibration through antiblackness. During the March First Movement of 1919, the largest and most symbolically significant anti-colonial mobilization, Korean nationalist leaders deployed racialized language that differentiated the Korean nation from groups coded as inherently uncivilized. In the independence declaration, Japanese colonialism was condemned through the assertion that Koreans had been treated “like ignorant natives” (tomaein). The modifier mae (“ignorant”) here qualifies tomaein—a variation of toin (“native”), historically used to denote Black people (as in African toin) and other populations classified as inferior, savage, or uncivilized (Kim and Jung, 2019; Kim and Lee, 2025). Rather than generating anticolonial solidarity, this rhetoric affirmed Korea's claim to modern nationhood precisely through the negation and epistemic effacement of Blackness. Anticolonial resistance in this context thus relied on an antiblack epistemic logic, highlighting the limits of postcolonial/decolonial sociology's emphasis on epistemic pluralism and relational solidarity. 8
These cases illustrate how East Asian actors mobilized antiblackness as an epistemic resource through which modernity, civilization, and national belonging were articulated. As the preceding framework suggests, effacement operated not as the secondary adoption of Western racial schemes but as a dynamic process that positioned Blackness as a conceptual limit—an absent presence against which civilizational worth and political legitimacy were continually defined.
Seen through Foucault's notion of the historical a priori, antiblackness organized the very conditions of intelligibility in these contexts, shaping what could appear as reason, progress, humanity, or deservingness. Durkheim's sacred/profane distinction further clarifies how Blackness operated as a profane boundary whose exclusion secured a coherent national self. Benjamin's account of the profane, in turn, illuminates how these disavowed figures expose the constructed and unstable character of the modern epistemic order itself.
Recognizing these dynamics unsettles the assumption that race was peripheral to East Asian modernity. Rather than operating at the margins, the region's fragmented yet persistent mobilizations of antiblackness reveal its structuring role in shaping ideas of civilization, progress, and national identity. These dynamics underscore the global centrality of antiblackness within modern historical sociology.
Iran: Historical Erasure and Antiblack Epistemic Conditions
In The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran (2024), Beeta Baghoolizadeh demonstrates how modern Iranian identity systematically erased its historical connections to Blackness and enslavement. Under Reza Shah's early twentieth-century modernization policies, concerted efforts sought to eliminate visible traces of slavery. Symbolically charged acts—such as demolishing the Golestan Palace harem, a vivid architectural testament to enslavement, and replacing it with governmental structures—enacted both the physical and symbolic removal of enslaved Black lives from national memory. Textbooks, dictionaries, and official state narratives further rewrote Iranian history, denying the existence of slavery and recasting it as an exclusively Atlantic and American phenomenon (Baghoolizadeh, 2024).
Baghoolizadeh's account of state narratives and educational knowledge shows that erasure operated not only through physical removal but through the reorganization of historical intelligibility itself. After the 1929 Manumission Law, formerly enslaved people and Black Iranians were incorporated as Iranian citizens without being recognized as a distinct racial or historical population, producing governmental and archival silences that made their histories difficult to trace. Dictionaries, textbooks, and other sources of public knowledge further displaced slavery from Iranian history by attaching bardeh-dari (slavery) to an American and Atlantic frame. Pahlavi-era textbooks did not acknowledge Iranian slavery or Iran's participation in the transnational slave trade; slavery became legible as a foreign problem, while Blackness was detached from Iran's own national past (Baghoolizadeh, 2024).
This active erasure demonstrates how antiblackness operated as an epistemic practice in modern Iran: Blackness was not merely marginalized but rendered historically unthinkable, enabling a national identity that disavowed its own entanglement with enslavement. Iranian modernity did not simply absorb Western racial narratives; it enacted its own process of effacement, producing a historical record in which Blackness could not appear as part of the nation's past or present.
As the earlier framework suggests, this erasure exemplifies the work of the historical a priori: antiblackness delimited what could register as history, memory, or national belonging. The boundary-making force of the sacred and the profane is likewise evident, as Blackness—coded as a profane remnant of enslavement—was excluded to secure a purified vision of Iranian modernity. At the same time, the very spaces and narratives removed through this process function as sites of profane illumination, exposing the contradictions and omissions that stabilize Iran's modern self-understanding.
Situating antiblackness within Iran's formation challenges the assumption that race was marginal or derivative in this context. The Iranian case demonstrates how antiblackness structured the terms through which civilization, national identity, and historical truth became intelligible—underscoring the global reach and epistemic centrality of antiblackness beyond the Atlantic frame.
Antiblackness as a Global Epistemic Condition
Illuminating this global, pervasive, yet often unacknowledged epistemic role of antiblackness unsettles historical sociology's conventional assumptions and epistemological boundaries. Conceptualizing antiblackness as foundational rather than relational—as an epistemic condition rather than an institutional outcome—reveals that modern social orders reproduce themselves through continual acts of negation. This shift reframes sociological inquiry, exposing how prevailing models fail to account for the epistemic architecture that makes modern institutions, categories, and forms of social coherence possible.
Historical sociology's engagement with antiblackness can thus be understood as a mode of epistemological revolutionary suicide: a refusal of the inherited epistemic ground that enables the discipline to approach antiblackness only as a relation rather than a condition. Just as revolutionary suicide ruptures oppressive frameworks to generate new possibilities for life, this antisociological orientation strategically interrupts historical sociology's inherited categories of race, modernity, and knowledge, enabling radical disciplinary reimagination. Confronting antiblackness as modernity's foundational epistemic condition is therefore indispensable to historical sociology's continued vitality, relevance, and transformative potential.
Conclusion
Conceptualizing antiblackness as modernity's historical a priori reveals it as an epistemic condition that structures and continually recalibrates modern social and intellectual orders. By critically engaging relational theories of race, racial capitalism, postcolonial/decolonial sociology, and Afropessimism, this analysis develops a theoretical synthesis centered on David Marriott's conception of effacement. Integrating Marriott with Foucault's historical a priori, Durkheim's sacred/profane distinction, and Benjamin's profane illumination demonstrates that antiblackness is not a relation internal to modernity but the generative condition that makes modernity's categories possible. This synthesis builds from Moon-Kie Jung's call for antisociology while retaining Afropessimism's emphasis on antiblackness as a constitutive rupture, without reproducing the ontological fixity associated with some of its formulations. Antiblackness is reframed instead as a historically dynamic and epistemically generative condition.
Sociology's forgotten vocation has always been epistemological. In the tradition that has come to dominate sociological ‘canon’ formation, the central question was never simply how to describe society but how categories of knowledge become possible. Durkheim asked how time, space, and causality arise as social facts; Weber traced the emergence of distinct forms of rationality that made particular kinds of explanation and meaning thinkable; Marx analyzed the generative epistemic effects of domination: how capitalist relations produce categories, perceptions, and explanations that obscure their own conditions. Du Bois extended this tradition by demonstrating that modern knowledge rests upon the global color line—that Western “civilization” coheres through an antiblack architecture of truth and reason. His insight anticipates the claim advanced here: modernity becomes intelligible through the continual effacement of Blackness. Antisociology, as articulated here, reclaims this epistemological vocation by shifting attention from relational descriptions of inequality to the historical conditions that make the social—and the knowable—possible.
Empirical illustrations from East Asia and Iran demonstrate the global applicability of this framework. Antiblackness persists not only where the legacies of Atlantic slavery are most pronounced but as a generative epistemic logic structuring modernity across contexts typically cast as peripheral to racial slavery. Such reach may invite the concern that this reframing risks abstraction—that it might distance analysis from the particularities of Black suffering or reduce Black life to a theoretical function. Yet the opposite is the case. Conceptualizing antiblackness as modernity's historical a priori clarifies, rather than obscures, how embodied violence, exclusion, and negation are systematically produced and reproduced. It reveals that Black suffering is not incidental to modernity but the very mechanism through which modernity stabilizes its categories of humanity, rationality, and social order.
Emphasizing the historical contingency of these epistemic conditions does not imply that antiblackness is uniformly manifested across all historical conjunctures or that it operates identically in every context. Rather, the argument identifies antiblackness as a condition of modernity whose forms, intensities, and mechanisms are historically variable even as its epistemic function remains foundational. This does not mean that antiblackness is easily overcome or simply one social relation among others; rather, it highlights that modernity's epistemic architecture is historically produced and therefore neither natural nor universal. Antiblackness functions as a rupture not because it is metaphysically fixed, but because modernity retrospectively requires this contingent negation to operate as foundational. This reframing does not gesture toward the possibility of a modernity purified of antiblackness; it underscores that what is called “modernity” is inseparable from its continual recalibration through antiblack effacement. Honoring the contingency of this epistemic structure is precisely what preserves the historical specificity of Black suffering. It situates Black life at the epistemological center, revealing that violence against Black communities is not a deviation from modernity but one of its constitutive operations. In doing so, this analysis opens conceptual space for imagining epistemic and social formations no longer anchored in such negation.
These stakes extend beyond theoretical refinement. Relational frameworks misrecognize antiblackness as a visible social problem amenable to institutional reform. Reframing antiblackness as foundational instead relocates critique to the epistemic conditions that make institutions possible in the first place. Doing so expands the horizon of sociological imagination, allowing for the possibility of social orders no longer defined by the binaries—being/non-being, civilized/uncivilized, rational/irrational—that antiblackness stabilizes as their zero point.
Finally, this framework clarifies the stakes of resistance within modernity's epistemic structure. If modern knowledge continually reproduces itself through antiblackness, resistance cannot rely solely on reforming institutions; it must confront the epistemological conditions that make those institutions intelligible. In this sense, historical sociology's engagement with antiblackness becomes a form of epistemological revolutionary suicide: a refusal of the epistemic foundations that bind sociology to modernity's antiblack order. Such refusal is not annihilative but emancipatory, opening the possibility of forms of knowledge—and forms of social life—not anchored in the continual effacement of Blackness. Just as revolutionary suicide disrupts oppressive frameworks to create new possibilities for life and thought, this antisociological approach strategically interrupts historical sociology's assumptions about race, knowledge, and modernity, enabling radical disciplinary reimagination. No claim is made here to offer a comprehensive explanatory model of antiblackness; the aim is to clarify the epistemic ground from which further historical and sociological analyses must proceed. Engaging antiblackness as modernity's historical a priori thus becomes essential for sociology's continued vitality, relevance, and capacity to imagine futures beyond antiblack foundations—futures oriented toward epistemic and social liberation.
Footnotes
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