About
Performance Ethnographer
Historian of Medicine
Cultural Theorist
“The beautiful anarchy of the corner refused no one. It was the one place where they could quit searching and rest for a while, and still believe they were moving and on the way to some place better than this. […] All were permitted to stay briefly, catch their breath, resist the pull of roaming, hustling, and searching. Every hour someone remarked, I got to go, and then lingered. Newcomers refreshed the crowd; strangers became intimates. The flow of those arriving and departing kept it alive. The same folks were always there and yet it always looked different.” — Saidiya Hartman
Hello! My name is Pyar Seth (Pronounced P.R.) and I am currently an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame. I received my PhD in Anthropology and Political Science from Johns Hopkins University. Alongside my doctoral training, I spent time as a Visiting Research Scholar at King’s College London in the History of Medicine.
Working at the intersection of Black Studies, historical and medical anthropology, and postcolonial theory, much of my research focuses on the rationalization of state violence and the abstraction and distortion of Black life and death. I draw on performance studies to read medical history, combining archival, ethnographic, and sonic methodologies to document the excesses of the archive. Drawing insipration from Toni Morrison, Stuart Hall, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Zora Neale Hurston, I trace how the histories slavery, empire, colonialism, and imperialism circulate across geographic and institutional boundaries through a persistent staging, scripting, and surveillance of bodies. My scholarship has been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Political Science Association.
My classes generally focus on creating a space where theory and method enter into conversation, asking that we approach the question of justice not as something be solved but as something to be inhabited. We practice listening to ourselves, our stories, and the everyday affective texture of social life between capture and encounter, between contstraint and possiblity.
A central question underlying much of work is the following: Given the pervasiveness of anti-Black violence, for Black people, what does it mean to rest? As a Black person, I have grown all too accustomed to seeing the communities I love be dealt an unjust, wrongful hand — forced to experience persistent negation and racial violence. “Go home and rest” is a common phrase uttered to those dealing with anger and fatigue. But time is an asset, a privilege unafforded to many. My work is animated by a commitment to imagining otherwise, where suffering is not deemed a functional necessity, to story our way toward a future not yet here, the hard work of building the world we need from the world we have.
On a more personal note, usually I stay to myself but mention research and the unabashed extroverted nerd is suddenly everywhere. Singing is breathing. Fashion is language. Poetry is thought at rest. Sport is rhythm and release. You can usally find me playing basketball or volleyball, or watching track & field. Comics taught me how to live in the space of what is and what could be. Film taught me how image and sound choregraph meaning. Originally from Norfolk, Virginia — I carry the 757 in my heart wherever I go, forever shaped by the place where I learned to see.
Current Research Agenda
Book
Scripted Death: Spectral Defects and Scenes of State Violence
My first book project, The Spectral Defect: Clinical Afterlives of State Violence is an intellectual and cultural history of medical diagnoses that have been used to ‘explain away’ concerns about racialized fatalities that occur in state custody, dating from roughly the 1940s to the present. Many of the diagnoses that I examine throughout the book (i.e. excited delirium, ganja psychosis, vegan syndrome) are not recognized by the American Medical Association, the World Health Organization, and the like. Yet, these conditions still appear in autopsies, toxicology reports, death certificates, and state inquests into ‘suspicious deaths’ across the United States, Canada, Britain, and the West Indies, prompting the question: How does the medicalization of racial violence travel across the boundaries of the nation-state and what might we say about a kind of transatlantic pathologization of Black life and death? Proponents as well as skeptical members of these condition oftentimes frame their concerns around the same question: Are these ‘real’ biomedical conditions? However, I argue that focusing on such questions misses an opportunity to assess the constitutive relations through which medical concepts come into view and the logics that make these medical determinations possible. Broadly, I draw attention to how both medicine and policing work together to characterize Black life as lacking, already sick, and destined to die. Touching on questions across psychiatry, human biology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics, The Spectral Defect offers new possibilities for social scientists and historians to understand the construction of biomedical accounts, and the use of epidemiological information.
Book
Markets for Souls: Necrofinance, Slavery, and the City of London
My second book project, Market of Souls: Necrofinance, Slavery, and the City of London (co-authored with Alexandre White) is based on a digital humanities project I co-developed with Black Beyond Data (BBD), a Mellon-funded computational humanities research consortium housed at Johns Hopkins University and Brown University dedicated to humanizing and repurposing health data, slavery and data, and community data (https://underwritingsouls.org). Market of Souls explores how institutions within the financial district of London developed novel technologies that maintained and expanded the slave trade. Through its elaborate networks, the City of London refined the commodification of Black life and death to guarantee profitability on an unprecedented scale. Slave traders constantly faced the possibility of catastrophic financial losses due to shipwrecks, disease outbreaks, insurrections, or capture by enemy vessels. A single failed voyage could bankrupt a merchant; insurance markets such as Lloyd’s of London emerged as the central mechanism for managing these risks, allowing traders to transform precarity into a predictable commercial enterprise. Unlike traditional insurance companies, Lloyd’s operated as a space where risk could be distributed across multiple underwriters — a structure perfectly suited for the extreme uncertainties of the slave trade. By allowing underwriters to each shoulder a fraction of the risk, Lloyd’s created a system where even the most perilous voyages became profitable; it also facilitated an interconnected networks of financial specialists who developed expertise in reducing human trafficking to specific calculations. Insurance markets did not merely facilitate the slave trade; they fundamentally reconstituted it. Akin to my first book project, these archives are shaped by notions of risk, where attributions of Black life are increasingly measured and understood in speculative terms.
To compliment some of our research, we partnered with Spread the Word and Ink Sweat & Tears Press to develop a poetry volume. For as much as primary source materials can tell us about the financial logics that orchestrated the trafficking and enslavement of African people, we do not know what sort of lives African people made for themselves. Where historical records lose form, art endures. That was the vision of the volume.
Book
Sick Beats, Savage Minds: Hip Hop and the Remaking of Neuroscientific Inquiry
At its core, Sick Beats, Savage Minds is an exploration of the way that Hip Hop became an object of study in neuroscience research. In the 1980s and 90s, there was a proliferation of research in cognitive neuroscience that was interested in music and its effects on the brain. As Hip Hop rose to prominence, researchers began to associate crime rates in urban centers with Black youth and their boom boxes thundering on street corners. Convinced they had surrendered their sanity to 808s and samples, neuroscientists made a host of connections that conveniently reinforced long-standing notions about an innate “Black crime gene.” But the demonization of Hip Hop cut even deeper. The public had always heard the devil in Black music — the blues was satanic, jazz was moral decay, rock and rock was the corruption of innocent souls. Hip Hop inherited a genealogy of fear, and these ideas suggested that Black people carried more than predisposition to crime; they bore a spiritual contamination, their music a conduit for otherworldly chaos.
Wayward Inquiry 