EXCITED DELIRIUM | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation

In 1980, Miami-based medical examiner and self-proclaimed “cult expert” of Afro-Caribbean religions Charles Wetli identified what he called “excited delirium syndrome.” Soon, medical examiners began using the syndrome regularly to describe the deaths of Black men and women during interactions with police. Police and medical examiners claimed that Black people with excited delirium exhibited superhuman strength induced from narcotics abuse. It was fatal heart failure that killed them, examiners said, not forceful police restraints.

In EXCITED DELIRIUM: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines this fabricated medical diagnosis and its use to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities. Exposing excited delirium syndrome’s flawed diagnostic criteria, she outlines its inextricable ties to the criminalization of Afro-Latiné religions. Beliso-De Jesús demonstrates that it is yet a further example of the systemic racism that pervades law enforcement in which the culpability for state violence is shifted from the state onto its victims. In so doing, she helps to further understand the complex layers of medicalized state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States.

EXCITED DELIRIUM also presents how families, communities and scholars are haunted by police violence. Beliso-De Jesús shares her own trials dealing with the trauma of studying these killings, and how she and her community draw on Afro-Latiné spiritual traditions to forge a new pathway.

Dr. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is joining us on the Busboys stage alongside movement lawyer, organizer, and author Derecka Purnell to share more about the intentionality of excited delirium as a tool of abuse and power in policing and why we need decolonial abolition and radical reconfiguration of policing. Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and Beliso-De Jesús will be signing following the program.

This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of EXCITED DELIRIUM will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is in person and will not be livestreamed. 

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Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Ph.D. is the Olden Street Professor of American Studies at Princeton University and the chair of the Effron Center for the Study of America. A cultural and social anthropologist, she has conducted ethnographic research with Santería practitioners in Cuba and the United States, and police officers and Black and Brown communities affected by police violence in the United States. Her research and teaching span the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and Afro-Latiné circulations. Dr. Beliso-De Jesús’ work contributes to scholarship on race, religion, and law enforcement.

Her first book, Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion (Columbia University Press, 2015) won the 2015 Albert J. Raboteau Award for Best book in Africana Religions. It details the transnational experience of Santería in which racialized and gendered spirits, deities, priests, and religious travelers remake local, national, and political boundaries and actively reconfigure notions of technology and transnationalism. Her co-edited volume, The Anthropology of White Supremacy: A Reader (Princeton University Press, 2025), brings together anthropologists from across the globe to interrogate and dismantle the colonial, political, and economic structures of white supremacy, analyzing it as a global phenomenon. She is completing a book, Zombie Patrol: Policing African Diaspora Religions which examines the criminalization and racialization of Black and Brown religions in the U.S. Dr. Beliso- De Jesús is also co-director of a team-based ethnographic research project on police use of force in New Orleans, LA that was funded by the National Science Foundation. 

Her publications include articles in American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, Signs, the Journal of Africana Religions, and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. She joined the faculty at Princeton University after eight years at Harvard Divinity School where she was Professor of African American Religions and member of the Cuba Policy Committee at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, a faculty member of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and on the faculty board of the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. 

Dr. Beliso- De Jesús 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. For over twenty years, she has worked with numerous grassroots, public policy, substance abuse, and other nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area advocating social justice issues, teen-parent support, alternative healing approaches for Latiné communities, and empowerment strategies for youth of color.

Derecka Purnell is a movement lawyer, organizer, and author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom. She received her JD from Harvard Law School, her BA from the University of Missouri- Kansas City, and studied public policy and economics at the University of California- Berkeley as a Public Policy and International Affairs Law Fellow. Her writing has been published widely, including in The Oxford Handbook of Race and Law in the United States (forthcoming), The Harvard Journal of African American Policy, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New York Magazine, Boston Review, Teen Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar. Purnell has lectured, studied, and strategized around social movements across the United States, The Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In 2022, she was selected as a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation. She is a member of Dream Defenders.

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