Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús: “Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease”

Join Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús for a powerful discussion of her new book, which unearths the disturbing history and ongoing impact of “excited delirium syndrome,” a fabricated medical diagnosis used to absolve police of responsibility in the deaths of mostly Black and Latiné men. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and historical research, Beliso-De Jesús exposes how this invented condition—rooted in racial eugenics and pioneered by Miami medical examiner Charles Wetli—has been deployed to cloak state violence in the guise of physiological failure and drug use. Through a decolonial approach, dismantling the supposed neutrality of Western medical and legal systems that perpetuate racial hierarchies under the guise of expertise, Beliso-De Jesús blends ethnography and intimate journal entries, fusing intellectual examination with critical reflection. She writes not only of data but of spirits—those of the dead who continue to haunt, whose deaths demand justice. In braiding her own experiences with Afro-Latiné spiritual traditions into the narrative, she offers a form of resistance and healing, one that transcends the Eurocentrism of Western rationalism. Excited Delirium stands as a powerful testament to the ongoing struggle against the criminalization of Black and Brown people and the urgent need to confront the state’s role in racialized violence.

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is Olden Street Professor in American Studies and Chair of the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University. A cultural and social anthropologist, she has conducted ethnographic research with Santería practitioners in Cuba and the United States, and police officers and communities of color affected by police violence in the United States. Her recent monograph, Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence and the Invention of a Disease (Duke University Press, 2024) examines the medicalization of police violence. In addition, she has a co-edited volume, The Anthropology of White Supremacy: A Reader (Princeton University Press, 2025), which brings together anthropologists from across the globe to interrogate white supremacy as a global phenomenon. Her first book, Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion (Columbia University Press, 2015), won the 2016 Albert J. Raboteau Award for the Best Book in Africana Religions. Her academic publications include articles in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Signs, the Journal of Africana Religions, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the Annual Review of Anthropology. Beliso-De Jesús is also the co-founder and co-director of the Center on Transnational Policing (CTP) at Princeton University, and just finished her tenure as Editor-In-Chief of Transforming Anthropology, the flagship journal for the Association of Black Anthropologists.

Sponsor(s): Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, Department of African American Studies, Department of Ethnic Studies

For more information about this event or for accessibility related inquiries, please write to Iliana Morton, ilianamorton@berkeley.edu