Look back at some of the most high-profile cases involving Black people who have died while in state custody. A disturbing pattern emerges in the autopsy findings and coroner’s reports: “hypertension,” “heart disease,” “thin skulls,” “fatty tissue,” “sickle cell trait.” Somehow, the deceased is always to blame for their own death. The police rarely face judgment, and medicine is one of their most potent tools. Scientific language carries enough gravity to make even the most dubious explanations about racialized fatalities feel solid, credible, and true. When medicine speaks, doubt retreats—and the state has learned to speak medicine fluently.

In this groundbreaking and haunting work, Pyar Seth reveals how medicine has been used in service of modern policing. Drawing on extensive archival research and powerful ethnographic fieldwork, Seth exposes what he calls the spectral defect—a logic of global narco-delinquency that marks certain lives as inherently lacking, already sick, and destined to die. The book follows these logics across borders and through institutions, from courtrooms to coroner’s offices, prisons and psychiatric wards, to show us how medical terms such as “acute behavior disturbance,” “excited delirium,” and “ganga psychosis” have long been used to justify racial violence despite widespread rejection by most professional medical bodies.

Truly interdisciplinary in scope, Scripted Death explores what it means to encounter Black lives at their final documented moments. It is essential reading for understanding how medicine and criminal punishment conspire to help reinforce racial orders, determining whose death requires explanation and whose life can be filed away.

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.

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Digital Exhibition on Anti-Colonial Resistance

For over a century, Black music was blamed for social collapse, each genre accused of possessing some kind of mysterious power that transformed listeners into threats. The blues, rock and roll, jazz—all with the supposed capacity to dissolve the boundaries of civilized restraint. When Hip Hop exploded across urban America in the 1980s, these fears of sonic contagion assumed a unique form of life. Now there were advanced medical technologies like fMRI machines, brain imaging technologies, and neuroscientific protocols that promised to prove what moralists had long suspected. An influx of research on music and its impact on the brain emerged, and Hip Hop became a recurring and disproportionately targeted object of study. Scientists claimed that Hip Hop was responsible for rising crime rates in urban centers, and suggested there was a causal relationship between musical exposure and antisocial behaviors. Youth detention facilities cited research on music and aggression when designing sensory deprivation protocols. Parents were counseled by psychologists to monitor their children’s playlists as carefully as their peer groups. Hip Hop was a diagnosis awaiting its cure. 

The Making of the Hip Hop Brain is an intellectual and cultural history of the biomedicalization of Hip Hop, tracing how Black music has been reinterpreted over time—from a ‘spiritual threat’ to a ‘neurological defect’—and, more broadly, its role in shaping technoscientific and diagnostic infrastructures that mediate Blackness through models of innate criminality and speculative genetic explanation.  Drawing on archival research across psychiatric clinics, neuroscience laboratories, juvenile detention facilities, and religious institutions alongside performance and sonic ephemera (i.e. flyers, mixtapes, recordings), I examine how Hip Hop facilitated the creation of novel medical knowledge, retooling deviance into clinical proxy for cognitive load and Black aesthetic expression into a measurable biological deficit. The underlying premise: African diasporic populations might share neurological patterns that draw them toward polyrhythmic structures, with their brains processing syncopation differently than European-descended listeners.