Antiblackness as Modernity's Historical A Priori: Effacement and the Generative Logic of the Global Epistemic Order

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.