We are very excited to host our very first campus book sale next Thursday, October 17. We will be set up on the Bryan Center Plaza on Duke University’s West Campus from 10 am until 4 pm.
Books will be deeply discounted, as low as $1 each! The sale is open to the public. We will be accepting credit and debit cards only, no cash.
You can find information about parking on campus here. In case of rain, we will relocate the sale to our offices at Brightleaf Square’s North Building at 905 W. Main Street, Suite 18B in Durham.
We’re excited to meet our North Carolina customers in person and hope to see you next week!
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today that the Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition will present a cultural and historical examination of the Black dandy, from the figure’s emergence in Enlightenment Europe during the 18th century to today’s incarnations in cities around the world. Entitled Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, the exhibition is inspired by Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Miller, Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard University, will serve as guest curator for the exhibition. She will be the first Black curator of a Costume Institute exhibition.
Superfine is also Met’s first fashion exhibition to focus solely on the work of designers of color, as well as the first in more than two decades to focus explicitly on men’s wear. Miller told the Washington Post, “It’s a big moment for the country. For acknowledging where we are and where we want to be. … We’re at a crossroads as we think through what it means for all of us to be here together. I’m happy that we can talk about complicated history, about slavery, and revolution.” She told the New York Times that the show is “an opportunity for everyone on the curatorial team to really understand how many Black designers, historically and contemporarily, are out there.”
Slaves to Fashion is a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New York. Interpreting performances and representations of black dandyism in particular cultural settings and literary and visual texts, Monica L. Miller emphasizes the importance of sartorial style to black identity formation in the Atlantic diaspora. It was widely praised when it was published by general interest and scholarly publications alike. The beautiful cover image is a detail from “Yellow Book” by Iké Udé from Yellow Book and Savoy Covers: Make Life Beautiful!An informal introduction to the Dandy in Photography, 2003. It was used courtesy of Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, England, and Stux Gallery, New York.
The annual Met Gala, held the first Monday in May, will also highlight the Superfine theme of Black dandyism and will be co-chaired by Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, and Anna Wintour, along with honorary co-chair LeBron James. Perhaps they’d like to carry copies of Slaves to Fashion down the red carpet?
Congratulations to the 2024 MacArthur “Genius” Fellows. We are thrilled that author Jennifer L. Morgan, editor Ruha Benjamin, and contributors Dorothy Roberts, Shailaja Paik, Ebony G. Patterson, and Juan Felipe Herrera were selected for the honor.
Jennifer L. Morgan is the author of Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (2021), which draws on the lived experiences of enslaved African women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to reveal the contours of early modern notions of trade, race, and commodification in the Black Atlantic. Read the introduction to the book for free here. The Journal of Early American History said the book “sets a new bar for historians of the early modern era and of Western modernity” and The MacArthur Foundation writes, “Morgan has established gender as pivotal to slavery’s institutionalization in colonial America, and her attention to the full ramifications of slavery for Black women sheds light on the origins of harmful stereotypes about Black kinship and families that endure to this day.
Watch Jennifer Morgan speak about her work:
Ruha Benjamin is editor of Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (2019), a collection that examines how carceral technologies such as electronic ankle monitors and predictive-policing algorithms are being deployed to classify and coerce specific populations and whether these innovations can be resisted and reimagined for more liberatory ends. Read her introduction to the collection here. The MacArthur Foundation says, “Benjamin deepens our understanding of the dangers that technological advancements pose to vulnerable populations while reimagining what counts as innovation and who gets to shape our collective future.”
Watch Benjamin speak about her work:
Several other awardees have contributed to our books and journals, and to honor their achievement and allow everyone to become more familiar with their work, we’ve made their chapters and articles free through October 31, 2024.
The MacArthur Fellowship aims to identify extraordinarily creative individuals with a track record of excellence in a field of scholarship or area of practice, who demonstrate the ability to impact society in significant and beneficial ways through their pioneering work or the rigor of their contributions. We are thrilled to have published the work of such dynamic scholars and send them all our heartfelt congratulations.
Fall is a great time to get out and catch our authors at events!
October 1, 6 pm EDT: Margaret Dorsey and Miguel Diaz-Barriga, authors of Fencing in Democracy, give an in-person book talk at the University of Richmond, Modlin Center for the Arts. 453 Westhampton Way, Richmond, Virginia
October 2, 12 pm EDT: Dr. Asli Zengin, author of Violent Intimacies, gives an in-person book talk, sponsored by GSS Princeton University. Corwin Hall 130, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
October 4, 9 am EDT: Stanley Fish, former Director of Duke University Press and author of Doing What Comes Naturally, joins Jane Tompkins for an in-person discussion honoring the 25th anniversary of Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute. Smith Warehouse, Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall, Bay 4, C105, Durham, North Carolina
October 7, 4:15 pm CEST: Thea Riofrancos, author of Resource Radicals, gives an in-person talk at the University of Vienna, entitled “Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.” Aleksandra Wojewska, Erika Faigen, and Sebastian Felten will respond. Centrum für Internationale Entwicklung, Sensengasse 3, 1090 Vienna
October 8, 4:30 pm EDT: The Association for Queer Anthropology and CLAGS present an online discussion of the recent book Unsettling Queer Anthropology edited by Margot Weiss, featuring Brian Horton, Scott Morgensen, Anne Spice, and Margot Weiss. Registration required.
October 10, 9:30 am EDT: Margaret Price, author of Crip Spacetime, is joined by Hannah Taylor for a hybrid conversation sponsored by the Duke Disability Inclusion and Community Empowerment Affinity Group and the Duke University Department of English. Registration is required. Rubenstein Library 153, 411 Chapel Drive, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
October 18, 1 pm EDT: Rivke Jaffe, author of The Rule of Dons, gives an in-person book talk at the Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies. LSC Conference Room, Lucy Stone Hall, Rutgers Livingston Campus, 54 Joyce Kilmer Ave, Piscataway, New Jersey
October 13, 3 pm PDT: Keiko Lane, author of Blood Loss, is in conversation with Lidia Yuknavitch at an in-person event at Powell’s Books. 1005 w. Burnside St., Portland, Oregon
October 19, 2 pm EDT: John Feinstein, author of Five Banners, joins Coach Mike Krzyzewski for an in-person conversation. This event is sold out, but there may be some standing room or day-of tickets available due to cancellations. The book is also for sale from Duke Stores. Griffith Film Theater, Bryan Center, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
October 20, 12:45 pm PDT: Lucas Hilderbrand, author of The Bars Are Ours, appears in person at Pride on the Page in Palm Springs. Palm Springs Cultural Center, 2300 E. Baristo Road, Palm Springs, California
October 21, 3 pm EDT: Margaret Price, author of Crip Spacetime, delivers a hybrid keynote address for Clemson University’s National Disability Employment Awareness Month events. Hendrix Student Center Almeda R. Jacks Ballroom A, 720 McMillan Rd, Clemson, South Carolina
October 26, 2:45 pm EDT: Thulani Davis, author of The Emancipation Circuit appears on a panel entitled “Black Resistance and Leadership” at the Boston Book Festival. Boston Public Library, Rabb Hall, 700 Boylston St, Boston, Massachusetts
October 26, 5 pm EDT: Miller Oberman, author ofImpossible Things, celebrates with an outdoor release party featuring Omotara James, Ricky Maldonado, and Wendy Xu. Unnameable Books, 516 Vanderbilt Ave., Brooklyn, New York
October 27, 3 pm EST: Keiko Lane, author of Blood Loss, appears in person at the Bureau of General Services Queer Division in a joint event with Hugh Ryan, author of Telling Queer Secrets. Joshua Gutterman Tranen will moderate. 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York City
October 28, 6 pm EDT, heath pearson, author of Life beside Bars, is joined by Naomi Murakawa for an in-person conversation at Labyrinth Books. 122 Nassau St, Princeton, New Jersey
October 28, 6:30 pm: Susan Stryker and McKenzie Wark, author and editor of When Monsters Speak, discuss the book in an online event sponsored by Intellectual Publics.
October 28, 7 pm EDT: Miller Oberman, author ofImpossible Things, is joined by Joan Kwon Glass, Jason B. Crawford, and I.S. Jones for a hybrid conversation at Books Are Magic.
October 30, 4 pm PDT: Susan Stryker, author of When Monsters Speak, joins Ava Kim and Christoph Hanssmann for an in-person conversation sponsored by UC Davis Trans Advocacy Network. Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, 254 Old Davis Rd, Davis, California
We are deeply saddened to learn of the death of literary critic Fredric Jameson on September 22, 2024. Jameson was Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. He is survived by his children and his partner, Susan Willis, Emerita Professor of English at Duke University.
Jameson’s influence on Duke University Press cannot be overstated. Senior Executive Editor Ken Wissoker says, “For many years I referred to the Press as ‘the house that Fred built’ the way Yankee Stadium was called ‘the house that Ruth built.’ It’s hard to imagine Duke University or Duke University Press without Fred’s intellectual leadership, his global reach, and his scholarly genius. He brought many authors to the Press, and many scholars to Duke, changing criticism and the humanities here and around the world. It’s an incomparable legacy.”
In 1991 we published Jameson’s book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which remains our all-time bestseller and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. It received the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. In 1989, Jameson and Stanley Fish, then a colleague of Jameson’s in Duke’s English department, started the series Post-Contemporary Interventions, which came to include over 120 influential books, including The Cultures of Globalization (1998), which Jameson edited with Masao Miyoshi, and Jameson on Jameson, a book of interviews with Jameson edited by Ian Buchanan.
Jameson received the 2008 Holberg Prize and the 2011 MLA Lifetime Achievement Award for his scholarship. The Holberg Prize committee wrote, “Jameson’s most lasting contribution to cultural analysis may be his account of postmodernism and postmodernity. His epochal book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) established the concept of postmodernity as a distinct period with its own specific social and cultural forms.”
Jameson’s influence has continued in the twenty-first century. A collection of his essays,Inventions of A Present (Verso), was published this year and a number of publications have been considering the lasting impact of his work. Writing in the September 2024 edition of Harper’s Magazine, Mark Grief comments, “It is characteristic of literature departments to see waves come and go. Fredric Jameson represents something like the lapping at the shoreline, which doesn’t go away and never ceases to turn up interesting things: shells, coins, and specimens of marine life heretofore unseen. Not only has Jameson been ceaselessly productive—he has often come bearing news, for more than fifty years.”
Jameson was much beloved as a teacher as well as honored as a scholar. A number of our authors studied under him. Nicholas Brown, author of Autonomy, says, “Intellectually, I came of age in Fredric Jameson’s classroom. In my first semester of graduate school, I thought I was—and perhaps was, if one is anything at twenty-two years old—a kind of Foucauldian. It is not only that Fred’s writings, seminars, talks, and even gestures have remained touchstones for me. Fred has always been for me—and always will be—a kind of superego. Everything I write gets a half-conscious gut-check. Would Fred think this was serious work?”
Jennifer Doyle, author of Shadow of My Shadow, was also a student of Jameson’s. She remembers, “I learned from Fred to push myself as a writer, to reach for the thing that turns common sense inside out, and to hang with difficulty. Actually, I should not use the past tense for this, because his writing will keep doing that for all of us. His work generates lasting, profound insight. Beyond the world of ideas, Fred and Susan modeled a way of living out the principles and ideas embedded in their writing and their teaching. They were both so accessible—so open to us. I was transformed by my time in the Literature Program, and left Duke with some wild ideas about what’s possible in one’s professional life! Fred really, really loved the work.”
Even in his final years, Jameson continued to work with our acquiring editors, recommending other scholars, and writing cover endorsements and peer review reports. He was truly a friend of the press who worked with many staff members and whose scholarship influenced many of our authors and editors. Truly one of the great thinkers of our time, he will be missed but his scholarship will endure.
The introduction to Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Readersituates the K-Pop group BTS and its global fandom in the broader histories of postwar South Korean popular culture, especially the interwoven fabric of pop music, youth culture, and progressive politics. During the Cold War decades, artists who were influenced by the rock, folk, soul, and R&B music that was channeled through US military bases were suppressed by the state, which deemed them decadent and immoral. After the transition to democracy in the late 1980s, many artists preserved the associations between popular music and social critique, even as the commercial pop music industry sought to cultivate a new youth consumer market amidst a liberalizing and increasingly middle class national public. This trajectory culminated in the billion dollar culture industry now known as K-Pop, of which BTS is a key representative. Below, one of the book’s co-editors Michelle Cho offers an annotated playlist of some of the music discussed in the introduction, which you can download for free here. You can also listen to a longer playlist on Spotify.
BTS, “Classroom Idea/교실 이데아” cover performance, original by Seo Taiji and Boys (1994), KBS 2016 Song Festival
BTS burst on the K-Pop scene in 2013 with musical themes and stage callouts to their predecessors in the industry, specifically the artists that propelled earlier generations of youth to self-recognition as the vanguard of South Korea’s late 20th and early 21st century pop cultural wave. BTS has excelled at making the trope of youth disaffection freshly urgent for their audiences around the world, even as they cover their elders’ hit tracks and recontextualize them for their own fervent fanbase. In 2017, BTS released a cover of “Come Back Home” in anticipation of the 25th anniversary of the commercial debut of the song’s original artist Seo Taiji, who is credited today with introducing a homegrown image of teen rebellion in the early 1990s. In this stage performance from 2016, as the group was making history as the most acclaimed K-pop act of their generation, BTS covered Seo Taiji and Boys’s generational screed “Classroom Idea.” (Turn on subtitles for the lyrics!)
BTS, “Perfect Man” cover performance, original by Shinhwa (2002), MBC 2015 Korean Music Festival
Among the series of homages that BTS has mounted throughout their career, this performance of “Perfect Man,” originally by early 2000s SM boy group Shinhwa (part of the first generation of pop idol groups in South Korea), stands out for longtime ARMY. Juxtaposing the group’s youthful appearance with the track’s avowal of manhood, this performance highlighted group member Jimin’s magnetic stage presence and dance skills, while also crediting groups like Shinhwa for helping to advance the eclectic blend of musical and performance elements (R&B, New Jack Swing, Rap, street dance) that have propelled groups like BTS to global popularity.
Epik High, “Fly” (2005)
Epik High, the group that arguably popularized K-hip-hop as a distinct subgenre of popular music in Korea, consists of three members led by Korean-Canadian frontman Tablo (Daniel Seon-woong Lee), who spent much of his youth in Vancouver and northern California. This track “Fly,” from their chart-topping album Swan Songs from 2005, offers a musical pep talk for their millennial youth generation. In many of BTS’s lyrical themes and their self-professed status as “hip-hop idols,” the group acknowledges their debt to Epik High. Arguably, the album concept for BTS’s Wings follows from “Fly,” and BTS’s 2020 magnum opus Map of the Soul: 7 announces its references not only to Carl Jung but also to Epik High’s albums Map of the Human Soul (2003) and Remapping the Human Soul (2007).
BoA, “No. 1” (2002)
Kwon Bo-ah, aka BoA, is a trailblazing K-Pop soloist, whose triumph as a crossover artist in Japan forever changed the way that the K-Pop industry conceived of its role as a regional rather than a national music and youth culture. As the hit single off BoA’s second full length album, released after her successful debut in Japan, the music video for No.1 features BoA on billboards in Tokyo, highlighting her dominance in Asia’s biggest pop music market. While the lyrics address a lover as “my No.1,” the track undoubtedly refers as well to the artist’s position atop the music charts. BoA was 16 during this release, representing idol celebrity as a transnational teen phenomenon influenced by American contemporaries like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. BoA’s success shaped Asian promotion strategies at her management company, SM Entertainment, especially the release of localized albums and tracks in multiple Asian languages. Her trajectory maps the terrain between and across US and Japanese pop industries that K-Pop artists have long navigated and that BTS’s own collaborations and Japanese language discography reflect.
Shin Joong-hyun, “Beautiful Rivers and Mountains/아름다운 강산” (1972)
Shin Joong-hyun is widely regarded as the godfather of Korean rock music. He began his career as a performer in military clubs catering to US troops after the Korean war in the 1950s. By the mid 1960s, Shin was releasing music with an ensemble called the Add4 and later writing and producing songs for other popular artists. However, his popularity drew scrutiny by the military regime of president Park Chung-hee, especially after 1972, when the US’s thawing relations with the PRC shed doubt on the stability of American support for Park’s anti-communist dictatorship. The track “Beautiful Rivers and Mountains” is a song originally commissioned by President Park to capitalize on Shin’s popularity and to commemorate the new Yusin Constitution, established by constitutional referendum to enable Park to remain president for life to install him as a de facto dictator. Instead of writing a patriotic song to legitimize Park’s rule, Shin wrote this masterpiece of Korean psychedelia with poetic lyrics that locate the soul of the nation not in the military government but in the shared bounty of the country’s beautiful rivers and mountains. This rebellious act landed Shin in jail with his music banned, as Park’s government cracked down on musicians who were thought to be inspired by America’s anti-war, counterculture movement.
Pearl Sisters, “My Dear (Nim-a)/님아” (1968)
The Pearl Sisters, along with the Kim Sisters and the Korean Kittens, were part of a postwar boom of all-women acts that drew inspiration from the girl group format popularized by Motown and that continues to impel contemporary K-Pop’s aesthetic of youthful uniformity. The Pearl Sisters’ hit album from 1968 was composed and produced by none other than Shin Joong-hyun, who wrote a galloping, syncopated melodic line for “My Dear” that captivated group member Bae In-soon with its novelty. While the song’s guitar instrumentation and rhythm were new to the soundscape of 1960s Korea, the lyrics—addressing an absent lover—echo the themes of separation caused by war and/or diasporic displacement that recur in most of the popular music of the modern period, from Korean folksongs to Japanese enka-influenced “trot” to pop ballads.
Yang Hee Eun, “Morning Dew/아침이슬” (1971)
Folksinger Yang Hee Eun’s career was launched by her popular rendition of “Morning Dew,” originally written and recorded by musician and playwright Kim Min-ki. Released in 1971, the song became a solidarity anthem in the student and worker-led pro-democracy movement, and was later banned on the empty charge of immorality because of its poetic lyrics. Caught in the crackdown on youth culture that ensnarled Shin Joong-hyun and others like the folk duo Twin Folio, “Morning Dew” would only be taken off the list of banned songs after 1987. It has since entered the South Korean pop cultural canon, covered by countless artists and celebrated by a recent televised concert for the 50th anniversary of the song’s release. Kim Min-ki would go on to a venerable career as a dramaturge in Seoul’s vibrant theater scene. When Kim passed away in July, 2024, BTS leader RM posted a tribute to Kim on his Instagram account, joining many prominent actors, artists, and musicians attesting to Kim’s widespread influence.
San Ullim, “Youth/청춘” (1981)
Formed by three brothers, Kim Chang-hwan, Kim Chang-hoon, and Kim Chang-ik, in 1977 as part of the burgeoning “campus band” movement, Sanullim (lit. Mountain Echo) was one of the most prolific and influential rock bands of the dictatorship era, releasing eleven albums between 1977 and 1986. Although Sanullim’s psychedelic rock and folk sound was clearly molded by their predecessors Shin Joong-hyun and Twin Folio, they evaded the earlier crackdown by the Park Chung-hee government because they emerged after the Vietnam War and in the context of the largely depoliticized campus music festivals of the day. The song “Youth” was released on Sanullim’s 7th album in 1981, when campuses were frequent sites of violent clashes between students, laborers, and military police in the protests against Chun Doo-hwan’s dictatorial presidency (which had besieged the city of Gwangju a year earlier, on the pretense of rooting out so-called communist agitators). This context recasts the song, whose lyrics sound a note of premature nostalgia for youth’s transience voiced by the still-young Kim Chang-hwan, as an elegy for the lives and innocence lost to the murderous regime. BTS’s oeuvre adapts this theme of youthful melancholy in tracks like “Spring Day,” which similarly indicts a society that exploits and devalues its youth.
BTS performs a special arrangement of “Arirang,” the most beloved folksong on the Korean peninsula (part of the popular musical repertoire in both North and South Korea), for the opening stage at the 2016 installment of K-CON Paris. K-CON is a K-Pop fan convention and music festival that began in Southern California in 2012. 2016 was an important year for the event’s transnational aims, which saw K-CONs on four continents, in Paris, Abu Dhabi, Chiba, Newark, and Los Angeles. K-CON’s first European installment offered undeniable evidence of K-Pop’s growing popularity with audiences beyond Asian diasporic communities. Since this performance, BTS have continued to serve as cultural ambassadors in the transnational pop music arena and to draw on traditional Korean aesthetic forms, for instance, in special performances of their 2018 single “Idol” costumed in hanbok (traditional Korean clothes) at historical sites like the Gyeongbok Palace in Seoul. While some may argue that BTS have transcended K-Pop as an ethnically-identified music industry and youth culture, the 2016 performance sees them anchoring the K-Pop industry at large and mobilizing the unifying force of Korean traditional culture. BTS’s “Arirang Medley” fuses all extant regional versions of the song with contemporary pop elements, presenting the group on a stage set with projections of premodern dancheong and textile patterns to convene the event’s full artist roster and reinforce K-Pop’s national brand.
Michelle Cho is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Along with Patty Ahn, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, Mimi Thi Nguyen, and Yutian Wong, she is a coeditor of Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader. Save 30% on Bangtan Remixed with coupon E24PTAHN.
As everyone heads back to campus, we’ve got some great in-person and virtual author events to add to your September calendar. Hope you can make it to some!
September 5: Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, author of Excited Delirium, is in conversation with Michael Walker at an in-person event at Magers & Quinn Booksellers. 3038 Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis, Minnesota
September 5, 7 pm PDT: Jennifer Doyle holds an in-person launch party for her book Shadow of My Shadow, featuring a short reading & reception, staged with the exhibition There is almost not an interval, curated by Luke Fischbeck. Human Resources Los Angeles, 410 Cottage Home St., Los Angeles
September 10, 5 pm AEST: Media Futures Hub at UNSW hosts an in-person book launch for Michael Richardson, author of Nonhuman Witnessing, featuring comments from Snack Syndicate (aka Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange). Esme Timbery Creative Practice Lab (D8), Esme Timbery Creative Practice Lab, High St, Kensington, Australia
September 10, 5 pm EDT: Jennifer Doyle, author of Shadow of My Shadow, gives an in-person talk at Duke University. East Duke Pink Parlor, 112 East Duke Building, Durham, North Carolina
September 11, 3 pm EDT: Srila Roy, author of Changing the Subject, discusses her book in-person at Georgetown University. Mortara Center for International Studies, Conference Room, 3600 N Street NW, 36th St NW, Washington, DC
September 12: Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, author of Excited Delirium, joins Tianna Paschel for an in-person conversation at Book Passage. 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco September 14, 2pm: Emma Heaney joins Grace Lavery, author of Closures, Beans Velocci, and Joanna Wuest, for a hybrid book launch for Feminism against Cisnesssponsored by Lesbian Herstory Archives. 484 14th Street, Brooklyn, New York
September 19, 4:30 pm EDT: Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, author of Excited Delirium, has an in-person conversation with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Theatre Intime at Murray Dodge Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
September 19, 7 pm PDT: Keiko Lane , author of Blood Loss, will be in conversation with Eric Wat at an in-person event at Skylight Books. 1818 N Vermont Ave, Los Angeles
September 25, 6:30 pm GMT: Katherine McKittrick, author of Sylvia Wynter and Dear Science and Other Stories, delivers the 2024/2025 Sylvia Wynter lecture on “The Poetics of Declension: Sylvia Wynter, NourbeSe Philip, and A Smile Split by the Stars.” Kings College London, Strand Campus, Strand, London
September 26, 6 pm EDT: Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, author of Excited Delirium, joins Derecka Purnell at Busboys and Poets for an in-person conversation. 14th & V, 2021 14th St NW, Washington, DC
Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is Olden Street Professor of American Studies at Princeton University and author of Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion. She is the co-founder of the Center for Transnational Policing (CTP) at Princeton University, and Editor-In-Chief of Transforming Anthropology, the flagship journal for the Association of Black Anthropologists. Her new book, Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease examines the emergence of “excited delirium syndrome” in the 1980s, a fabricated medical diagnosis used to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities in the United States.
What is excited delirium syndrome?
Excited delirium syndrome is a controversial and largely disputed medical diagnosis often cited in cases of sudden death during police encounters. Coined by medical examiners and invoked by law enforcement and other medical professionals, it has been used to justify deaths of people who are described by police as being in a state of extreme agitation, aggression, having superhuman strength, sweating profusely, and then said to suddenly die, typically following the use of forceful restraints. Critics argue that excited delirium syndrome is not a legitimate medical condition since it lacks any clear scientific basis, cannot be verified by autopsy, and is frequently used to justify excessive force, particularly against people of color.
Where did the syndrome originate?
The concept of excited delirium syndrome originated in the 1980s within law enforcement and forensic pathology circles, primarily in the United States. A key figure in coining the term was Charles Wetli, a medical examiner from Miami. Wetli was not only instrumental in shaping the narrative around excited delirium but also had a peculiar role as a self-proclaimed expert on Afro-Cuban religions for law enforcement criminal profiling. The concept of excited delirium emerges from Wetli’s problematic beliefs, including the notion that Black people were a separate species with a genetic defect making them more susceptible to cocaine use. Wetli claimed that as a result of drug use, Black people would spontaneously die around police after becoming aggressive, sweaty, and violent. In the book, I explore how Wetli’s pseudoscientific views and racial biases contributed to the invention of this fabricated disease, perpetuating systemic injustices and racial discrimination in policing.
Excited delirium syndrome came into the public consciousness after the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020. Derek Chauvin’s defense cited “excited delirium syndrome” as cause of death in his trial. Since then, it’s been revealed just how many killings of Black and Latino men at the hands of police have been written off by medical examiners as excited delirium. What other notable deaths have been originally attributed to this invented disease?
In addition to George Floyd, other notable cases of those labeled excited delirium syndrome include the deaths of Natasha McKenna, Elijah McClain, Johnny Hernandez, Israel Hernandez-Llach, Angelo Quinto, Carlos Ingram Lopez, and Jerica LaCour among many others. In each of these instances, excited delirium was cited to shift accountability away from police actions, framing these deaths as medical incidents rather than consequences of excessive force. Natasha McKenna, a Black mother, died after being restrained and tased with hundreds of thousands of volts of electricity while in police custody in Virginia. Elijah McClain, a young Black man, died after being placed in a chokehold and injected with ketamine by paramedics in Colorado. Johnny Hernandez’s death in Texas was attributed to excited delirium after he was beaten with batons by police, and Israel Hernandez-Llach was a nineteen-year-old graffiti artist who died in Florida after being tased by an officer. Angelo Quinto, a Filipino American, died in California after police deployed a knee-to-neck restraint similar to that used on George Floyd. Carlos Ingram Lopez died in Arizona after being restrained face down by police. Jerica LaCour’s death in Indiana was also dismissed as excited delirium, where she was injected with ketamine after she was restrained, which was the recommended treatment for those suspected of exhibiting this fake condition. These cases highlight a disturbing pattern where the diagnosis of excited delirium was used to obscure the role of police violence, perpetuating a narrative that deflects responsibility from law enforcement and blames the victims.
What has the reaction from official medical communities and law enforcement been since excited delirium has been in the spotlight in the last few years?
Following the murder of George Floyd, the reaction from the official medical community and law enforcement has been one of increasing scrutiny and rejection. The American Medical Association (AMA), the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and the World Health Organization (WHO) have all stated that excited delirium syndrome lacks a scientific basis and is not recognized as a legitimate medical condition. The ACLU and NAACP have also criticized the term for perpetuating racial biases and excusing police brutality. Several states across the country have taken steps to ban excited delirium syndrome as a legitimate cause of death. For example, California, Colorado, and Washington have recently enacted legislation prohibiting the use of excited delirium syndrome in police training and incident reporting. Just this year, the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and the National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME), the only two medical organizations that had previously legitimated the existence of excited delirium syndrome, have withdrawn their support and come out against it. These changes are part of a broader movement to address systemic racism and police violence. This shift is sweeping the country, reflecting a concerted effort to promote accountability and justice in law enforcement practices. The elimination of excited delirium syndrome from official usage represents a significant step towards rectifying past abuses and preventing future injustices, however the work is not done.
You write that even though the use of the term excited delirium syndrome may decline in use, the medicalization of police killings of Black and Latino men will continue. Can you explain more? What cases have we seen already?
Even though the term “excited delirium syndrome” is being increasingly discredited and removed from official use, the medicalization of police killings of Black and Latino people continues in other forms. Medical examiners and law enforcement agencies are now using the same explanations to describe deaths that occur in police custody without the term “excited delirium.” For instance, terms like “hyperactive delirium,” or heart failure based on drug use are still being listed as causes of death, shifting the focus from police actions to supposed medical conditions of the victims.
Recent cases illustrate this ongoing practice. In 2021, Mario Gonzalez died after police put their knee in his chest in Oakland California. The initial explanation called his death a “medical emergency,” avoiding the term excited delirium but disregarding the forceful restraint. The medical examiner claimed “methamphetamine toxicity” was the primary cause of death. In 2022, Frank E. Tyson’s death in Texas was another instance where restraint-related complications were cited instead of direct police actions. Tyson has been described as ‘George Floyd 2.0,’ since he was asphyxiated by police while handcuffed and subdued. In 2023, Keenan Anderson, a cousin of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, died in Los Angeles after being tasered multiple times by police; his death was initially attributed to cardiac arrest related to cocaine use, rather than the excessive force used. During the interaction Anderson reportedly told people nearby that the police were going to “George Floyd” him. These examples show that while the terminology might change, the underlying issue of medicalizing police violence persists.
You stumbled upon excited delirium syndrome while researching the criminalization of Afro-Latiné religions, and in this book, you braid the two together. What is the connection between the two?
Since 2013, I have been conducting ethnographic research with police officers and religious practitioners in the United States, focusing on the intersections of law enforcement and Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices. During this research, I discovered that Charles Wetli, the medical examiner who coined the term excited delirium, was a self-proclaimed expert on Afro-Caribbean “cults.” I found that Wetli’s dubious credentials and problematic methods in studying Afro-Cuban religions paralleled his approach in establishing excited delirium as a medical condition.
In the book, I reveal how Wetli leveraged his unsubstantiated expertise in Afro-Caribbean religions to gain credibility and authority, using similar tactics to promote excited delirium syndrome. Wetli’s racial eugenics approach, which pathologized Black and Latino people, is evident in both his criminal profiling of Afro-Cubans and African Americans and his assertions about excited delirium. Understanding Wetli’s impact on racial profiling and medicalizing police violence requires examining his work across these interconnected fields. By doing so, this book sheds light on the broader implications of his practices and the enduring legacy of racial bias in both medical and law enforcement practices.
The concept of spiritualism–specifically, being visited by spirits–is a common thread throughout the book. Spirit visitation was an essential part of your research and understanding of those you write about in the book. Can you describe the impact spirits had during your writing of this book?
Traditional social scientific approaches train scholars to maintain the facade of an objective observer, avoiding including one’s personal perspective or cultural background in our scholarship. This is a fundamental tenet written into how White scientific authority has been maintained for generations. However, many scholars of color have critiqued the notion of objectivity as itself a myth built to maintain the supremacy of Western European cultural knowledge. As an anthropologist born and raised in Afro-Caribbean traditions, my cultural and spiritual background was a crucial factor in my ability to uncover the links between excited delirium syndrome and the criminalization of Afro-Latiné religions. My personal experiences, specifically my culture’s ability to recognize and engage with spiritual copresences, were crucial components of my decolonial approach. Indeed, I first discovered excited delirium syndrome myself, because the deceased father of one of my research interlocutors, Jeremy Ellis, began to haunt me. Jeremy was killed during an interaction by police, and his death was labeled as due to excited delirium. I tell the story of him and his family throughout the book, how they found healing through Afro-Latina spiritual practices, and how his initial spiritual contact enabled me to understand and recognize how police and medical violence were intertwined.
Religion and spiritualism provide a compelling lens through which to explore police brutality and the criminalization of race. It seems that in communities where daily life is shadowed by racial violence and the threat of death, connecting with ancestors and maintaining relationships with the deceased become crucial for grieving and making sense of such realities. Could you elaborate on how these spiritual practices function as a means of coping and understanding in these contexts?
In the book, I discuss how my own family, comprised of Black and Latine Lukumi orisha priests, felt compelled to use their religious healing tools and ancestral ceremonies as forms of spiritual activism against police violence. For instance, they conducted ceremonies at sites where Black men such as Oscar Grant and Mario Woods were killed in the SF Bay Area community. These rituals, performed with the families of the deceased, provide the community with methods to heal while continuing to fight back against injustice. This approach is not about eschewing accountability for law enforcement but rather advocating for alternative forms of justice that begins with the spirits of those who have died and their families.
By engaging in these decolonial religious practices, my family and community demonstrate how spirituality can offer a powerful means of coping and resistance. These ceremonies empower the deceased and mobilize the living to confront and challenge the ongoing violence. In the book, I aim to capture the power of this community-oriented approach, showcasing its potential to not only heal but also to hold a mirror up to systemic injustices and demand change. This form of spiritual activism underscores the importance of integrating cultural and ancestral wisdom in the broader fight for justice and accountability.
You include journal entries you wrote while researching this book, with intimate and vulnerable revelations of grappling with the trauma and haunting of your discoveries and the people you came to know through their stories. Why was it important to include those journal entries?
Conducting this research, which delves deeply into the violence and deaths of many people, was profoundly challenging. As a scholar of color, it was important for me to acknowledge that research itself can be traumatizing. I therefore incorporated my own journal entries as ethnographic elements that reveal my own spiritual approach to help readers grasp the depth of the impact of the subject. The journal entries also show my own process as a decolonial researcher. They reveal how, through ethnography, archival research, and the active spirits of those labeled with excited delirium, I uncovered the fabricated nature of this so-called disease. By sharing my process, I aimed to provide a pathway through these violent stories and offer a counter-narrative based on my own family’s healing journey. It was difficult for me to encounter excited delirium, and rather than pretend that this research did not impact me, I embraced the troubling aspect of scholarship, that ultimately changes the researcher herself. It was my hope that through the journal entries, this format showcases how communities of color, particularly my own, come together, resist, and seek healing amidst the violence and terror of White supremacy.
What’s the main takeaway you want for readers of this book?
First, I want readers of this book to understand that excited delirium is not a legitimate syndrome. There is a common misconception that medical diagnoses are inherently helpful. It is difficult to see how medical practices are also tied to structures of oppression and racial violence. Through my research, I reveal how the White gaze shapes societal views of Black and Brown people, criminalizing us and, in the process, creating its own kind of excited delirium. The perception that Black and Brown people are dangerous is a social illness—an excited delirium of White society. This festering wound, originating from slavery and perpetuated through hundreds of years of racial inequality, has deeply corrupted the potential of American democracy.
It is my hope that readers recognize that police violence is not an isolated issue, but is deeply connected to medical and legal institutions often assumed to be neutral. As an anthropologist, my goal is to open readers’ eyes to this pervasive racial violence and trauma. By understanding these connections, I want people to be motivated to change systemic injustices. To do this, the book takes readers on an anthropological journey of excited delirium, uncovering the layers of how this fabricated illness was invented and perpetuated, ultimately challenging them to see and act against this all-encompassing racial violence.
Want to learn more? You can watch Aisha Beliso-De Jesús discuss her book with Christiane Amanpour or read an interview with her in Mother Jones. Save 30% on Excited Delirium with coupon E24BELDJ.
August 8 is International Cat Day! To celebrate, we’re sharing some images and excerpts from our bestselling 2023 book Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary by Leigh Claire La Berge. In the book, La Berge revises the medieval form of the bestiary to meet Marxist critique to show how cats have been central to both the consolidation of capitalism as well as some of its most fiercest critics. We hope you enjoy this feline tour through history.
Witches with animals, cat unremarked. Source: Federici, Caliban and the Witch,172.
As medieval society began to become commercialized — as money independent of land began to circulate more broadly and with more velocity as the labor market tightened as a result of between one-third and one-half of the continent’s laborers dying during the century-long bubonic plague pandemic — feudal lords and nobles began to feel threatened by an increasing number of “witches,” “millenarians,” and other “heretics,” many of whom were identified by their relationships with domestic cats.
Charles Édouard Delort, La distraction de Richelieu (The Cardinal’s Leisure), before 1885. Collection of Detroit Institute of Arts.
Effectively the ruler of France in the mid-seventeenth century, Cardinal Richelieu installed a cattery at the seat of government, the Palais Royal, to house his fourteen Persian and Angora felines. . . . Richelieu included provisions for his cats in his will, although they were offered only monetary allotments and not positions in government. One of the architects of the French absolutist state whose destruction was the goal of the French Revolution, Richelieu’s feline appreciation demonstrates a real historical distance from the feudal order. As a passing swipe at that medieval heritage, he seems to have jokingly named one of his cats Lucifer.
Charles Le Brun, lithograph, cat-man study from notebook “The relation between the human physiognomy and that of the brute creation,” 1671.
Court painter and founder of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, Charles Le Brun, produced a remarkable series of human-animal hybrid studies in which multiple species of felines as well as boars, camels, and donkeys made appearances. . . . In Le Brun’s work we see that cats continued to index social disorder, but no longer through the language of heresy. Instead they began to “represent subjects of the lower social orders, peasants or artisans, those social groups most likely to exhibit the bestial behavior that was the opposite of [the kind of ] civilité and civilization” that was emerging in a certain slice of France. Representations of them suggested “the bestiality of men from the lower classes, those who were not part of the civilizing process at the court of Louis XIV and in the Parisian salons.”
Cat Drinking from a Bowl, perhaps the world’s first cat photo, an undated daguerreotype by an unknown photographer. Source: Houghton Library, Harvard University.
As wildcats of all sorts coursed through various American frontiers, their lowly cousin, the domestic cat, was a rarity, but one whose mousing and ratting work was continually sought. Settler colonist Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House on the Prairie fame reports her Pa having to buy a kitten too young to be separated from its mother for fear that there would be no more domestic cats available on the Great Plains. During the San Francisco gold rush of 1849, cats were imported from Mexico (which the US Army was occupying) to help stamp out rodents. Meanwhile, in the industrializing Northeast, the reverse feline situation prevailed. Wildcats had begun to vanish and domestic cats to appear in everything from philosophical speculations to gothic horror stories to the results of a new invention, photography, with the world’s first cat photo likely taken in the mid-1840s.
This 1864 cartoon from Harper’s Weekly depicts a Civil War catfight: the United States of America versus the Confederate States of America as General Ulysses Grant looks on.
New World slavery generated enough wealth to transform the world, but some of its transformations included the undoing of New World slavery. The revolutions, inventions, and social transformations that brought the bourgeoisie to power would keep developing, and Marx suggested they would ultimately develop beyond the bourgeoisie itself. That is the case because the bourgeoisie, Marx explains, “cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” As capitalism brought this kind of systematic slavery into being, a new class of workers would, like they had done in Haiti, fight to the death to end it. In Harper’s Magazine (figure 6.8) this civil war was staged as a battle of cats with the Confederate States of America facing off against the United States of America while Union general Ulysses S. Grant looked on. Like proverbial Kilkenny cats, only the tail would be left at the fight’s conclusion.
Ralph Chaplin’s sabo-tabby, created for Walker C. Smith’s Sabotage pamphlet, 1913.
The real radical cats of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were found not in magazines and caricatures but in Chicago, a city whose connection to an emerging labor movement, industrial capitalism, and animals can hardly be overstated. It was in Chicago that the Haymarket Massacre took place in 1886. After union members’ and labor activists’ agitation for an eight-hour workday ended in more State-sponsored proletarian slaughter, some organizers began to realize that a structural confrontation with capitalism was necessary. Why call for an eight-hour working day when one could call for the end of work? The state’s response to the initial Haymarket rally, on May 1, a day now devoted to labor, radicalized a new generation of anticapitalists (both socialist and anarchist), and part of their new radicalism took feline form. Anarchist Emma Goldman traced her own political awakening to the massacre and compared her personal determination to that of a cat: “As my friends always used to say, ‘Emma is like a cat — throw her down from the highest point, and she will land on her paws.’”
Vladimir Lenin and feline comrade, 1922.
Like Marx, in his early work Lenin introduced the cat in an attempt to settle his basic categories. Of course we note the strange, shared etymology here: category, true in both Russian and German as well. To arrive at a category — the basic unit of abstract thought — one transits through a cat. In his 1909 book Materialism and Empiro-criticism Lenin had set forth to defend a philosophy of materialism — the belief that our minds reflect the world — against a new onslaught of idealism — the belief that the world reflects our minds. “To the mouse no beast is stronger than the cat,” Lenin wrote. While true for the mouse, the proposition does not have a universal validity. Thus, later in the text, in his discussion of positivism, or a value-free conception of science, Lenin returns to this statement: “Mach’s recent positivism has not travelled far from Schulze and Fichte! Let us note as a curiosity that on this question too for Bazarov there is no one but Plekhanov — there is no beast stronger than the cat. . . . When the Bolsheviks seized power Lenin moved into the government house with several cats with whom today he is sometimes pictured. He claimed to have quit eating meat in favor of rice cakes, a comment probably made in jest; he referred to his own meals as pet food.
Black Panther power: An Attack against One Is an Attack against All. Poster distributed by Robert Brown Elliot League, ca. 1970.
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense had been founded in 1966, in Oakland, California, in a Marxist reading group. These cats sought to replace a capitalist ideology with a communist one that specifically attended to the experience of African Americans in the United States. . . . The Panthers armed themselves, displayed their weapons publicly, and followed police as officers harangued and terrorized Black communities. Their feline name extended to their tactics. Police patrols would now have “panther patrols” surveilling them in order to protect neighborhoods of color. Living in what they called “panther pads,” they provided free food and other forms of aid to Black communities. As with the IWW, the Panthers’ black cat symbol was widely considered part of its force. The IWW had artist Ralph Chaplin; the Panthers had Emory Douglas, an artist who became the Black Panther Minister of Culture and set out to design the visual presence of the Panthers in posters, flyers, and Panther newspapers.
And finally, enjoy some photos of Marxist writers with their cats!
E. P. Thompson and his cat, writing The Making of the English Working Class (1968). Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm and Tricia. Source: The Guardian, February 10, 2019.Jacques Derrida and Logos. Photo by Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis.
James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924. During his centennial year, we have been excited to join other publishers in celebrating his legacy. Through the end of 2024, you can buy Baldwin’s only children’s book, Little Man, Little Man for only $9.99. We’re also offering a reading list of free online content by and about Baldwin. Check out our previous blog post to see everything we’re doing this year to honor the centennial of one of the world’s greatest writers.
Duke University Press News 