In Dance Cadaverous, Moon-Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas argue that the modern social world and modern social theory are foundationally antiblack. Antiblackness, the ontological exclusion inaugurated by racial slavery, persists while social theorists reproduce the exclusion, missing and misrecognizing this profoundly antisocial predicament at the heart of modernity. Across three historical moments—antebellum, Jim Crow, and contemporary—Jung and Vargas offer fundamental critiques of antiblackness, putting under scrutiny humanist and posthumanist social theories, science and technology studies, agency, genocide, racism, people-of-color intersectionality, and environmental justice. Drawing on radical Black study, freedom struggles, and jazz improvisation, they propose antisociology and abolitionist antipolitics as paths forward to provincialize and leave behind the modern social world.

Moon-Kie Jung teaches sociology and antisociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

João H. Costa Vargas teaches Black study and anthropology at the University of California, Riverside.

Prologue
Part I. Death
1. Antiblackness Beyond (Post)Humanism  7
Part II. Afterdeath
2. Antiblackness Beyond Genocide  41
3. Antiblackness Beyond Racism  61
Conclusion. Beyond the Weather of Antiblackness  79
Notes  109
References  123
Index