Pick Up This Book and Use It: Abolition, Anthropology, and the Archive in Tip of the Spear and Excited Delirium

It is a tough time to be an anthropologist who values Black life. While white nationalism is wrestling the levers of governmental power out of the hands of white liberalism, universities abandon commitments to Black studies and deepen their ties to white corporate power. Our interlocutors are being starved out, evicted, incarcerated, and murdered while our students are criminalized, brutalized, and repressed. They are calling for abolition: of the police, of incarceration, of the prison- and military-industrial complexes, and sometimes the university itself. After all, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney remind us, “an abolitionist university would be kinda like an abolitionist prison or an abolitionist To write an academic monograph in such an environment can feel, as I know all too well, like an exercise first in tragedy, then in farce.

What a pleasure, then, to have the opportunity to read two recent monographs by anthropologists committed to abolition that are serious, generative, and generous. In different ways, both Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt and Aisha Beliso-De Jesús’s Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease are texts conducting abolitionist work. Both are important reads for anyone seeking to do such work in the United States today. Each provides a model of what anthropology can offer to abolition, both despite and because of its tradition of complicity with whiteness, colonialism, and empire.

If you believe, as I do, that there are still questions that need answering and stories that need telling, or that there is a place even in these dire times for writers and scholars, the challenge becomes how to do work that people can pick up and use. The conversation in Anthropology and Black Studies around abolition has been dominated by the bind of complicity, the need to tear down much of what Michel-Rolph Trouillot called the “electoral politics” of our disciplines in order to make room for abolitionist work, and the (im)possibility of working simultaneously for a discipline’s approval and its . Calls to “let anthropology burn” or practice an “abolitionist anthropology” increasingly abound, but as Savannah Shange writes in “Abolition in the Clutch,” “Monographs as a form are meant to be consumable—bitable and citable—while abolition tends to be .”

Shange argues that despite this, there are aspects of anthropological work that are useful to the work of abolition: anthropological practices that might be useful as abolitionist tools. Per Merriam-Webster, tools are devices that aid in accomplishing a task. Per Audre Lorde, these tools must be devices that are not beholden to systems of domination. Shange names a few: “listening deeply, bearing witness, challenging the inevitability of the state, and building deep transnational and cross-diasporic .” In reading Burton and Beliso-De Jesús’s respective monographs, one can see all of these tools being put to practical use. The attentive reader can pick up these books and put them to abolitionist work.

In Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, Orisanmi Burton deploys a vast amount of archival material to retell the history of the 1971 Attica prison rebellion as an ongoing project of abolition and revolution, rather than as a singular historical . Drawing on a large collection of materials carefully assembled from institutional archives and personal collections, Burton employs a method he terms “archival war” to highlight the fundamental antagonisms between state narratives and the recorded words and experiences of incarcerated rebels. The story of Attica has been told and retold many times, but as Burton notes, the many varied retellings tend to treat the rebellion as an event with a clear beginning (the uprising) and end (the massacre). Moreover, those tellings tend to emphasize the rebels’ demands regarding the conditions of their confinement, while casting Black revolutionary goals as radical and impractical. Burton re-centers the revolutionary project through the words of the rebels (as told in interviews and archival material), following their political organizing within and beyond the walls of Attica to reveal an ongoing revolutionary project across multiple spaces in both the free and unfree world, as well as an ongoing brutal state war to repress and dismantle that project.

Burton’s use of the word “war” is not metaphorical. The targeting of incarcerated Black radicals for counterrevolutionary state violence should be seen, he argues, as the “tip of the spear” in a war targeting all of us. More broadly, he argues that “the ethnography of prisons, particularly prisons in the United States, should be reconceptualized as the ethnography of .” Burton makes the case that prisons are a tool of racial warfare through a meticulous examination of the strategies and tactics employed by the state and the language used in state records. Foregrounding the perspective of his interlocutors alongside the state archives, Burton shows a persistent insistence on naming the situation as one of war, naming the incarcerated as warriors, and highlighting the violence they endure as crimes of war through interviews, written letters, and published accounts. The stakes of Burton’s project are clear: by recognizing incarceration and the brutality that so often accompanies it as tactics of racialized warfare, rather than as tools of “law and order,” we can understand the actions of those who rose up in Attica Prison and others across the state in their full context. “They engaged in collective and targeted acts of counter-violence,” Burton writes, “for which many were labeled ‘extremists’ and ‘terrorists’ even though the physical trauma their resistance produced paled in comparison to that against which it .”

In making this case, Burton models a scholarly practice of archival research I hope others will pick up and put to use. State records are read “disloyally” against the grain and put into conversation with personal correspondences, public statements, grievances, petitions, and other such materials from incarcerated people to reveal how deep the harm and the intent to harm Black bodies and minds goes. Perhaps one of the most powerful chapters in the book, “The War on Black Revolutionary Minds,” highlights the experiences of men who were physically and psychologically tortured in New York State prisons through state initiatives such as the Prescription and Control Program, The Prison Activists Surveillance Program (PRISACTS), MK-Ultra, and other First-hand accounts of the torture experienced sit alongside grant proposals, letters to the Governor, and correspondences with the FBI praising regimes of pharmaceutical and psychological terror as necessary to repress “rabid” Black revolutionaries living in “open defiance and disdain” of white .

The book is well-written and thorough, and a must-read for anyone concerned with carcerality in the United States, past and present. I want to highlight in particular the tools Burton offers that readers might apply in their own work and abolitionist struggles. The first is the motivation behind the research itself. Burton reveals early on that this book is one of the many ways the inimitable Eddie Ellis continues to impact the world. Mr. Ellis, Burton tells us, suggested that Burton “make it my mission to use the resources of academic scholarship to rigorously elaborate a genealogy of knowledge production that today largely remains criminalized, pathologized, and intentionally hidden from public .” The tool that Mr. Ellis’s suggestion provides us here: do the work your elders ask of you.

Part of what that work entailed was not only accessing archives but building them. This includes, and is surely not limited to, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to fill out the state archive, as well as developing relationships with individuals who maintain their own archives. In addition to the myriad institutional archives accessed and interviews conducted, Burton also lists amongst his materials the personal collections of seven individuals who trusted him to care for and use those materials well. As one can see in the book’s acknowledgments or intuit from its thoroughness, the work of assembling this archive was far from a solitary endeavor and included more than a dozen research assistants and untold numbers of librarians and archivists. The tool to pick up and use here? Building community is necessary to, not separate from, one’s scholarship.

In building this archive, Burton dabbles in what he terms “mad science:” a “mode of study, explanation, and narration” that “defies established notions of time and politics and genres of written communication, begging to be interpreted in myriad .” Mad science also, critically, involves taking the speech and writings of mad people seriously and listening to them with respect. Burton does this primarily through engagement with a document titled “PETITION FOR CERTIFICATES EXTRAORDINARY,” written by one Casper Baker Gary to Nelson Rockefeller, then-governer of the state in which Mr. Gary was held prisoner. Gary lays out in great detail—and Burton refuses to sanitize—his experience of serial rape, torture, and degradation at the hands of guards at Attica Prison. Crucially, Burton does not simply mine Mr. Gary’s writings for factual details but takes seriously the framing, political goals, and writerly choices in the text. This act of writing and thinking with, not about people who have been deemed mad is another wonderful tool to pick up and use.

Casper Baker Gary’s is one of a few key voices that anchor the chapter titled “Gender War,” in which Burton lays out both the brutal sexual violence experienced by Black prisoners and the ways in which prison rebels sought to forge a positive Black masculinity in opposition to the white masculinity that requires their degradation. To engage the question of gendered violence in prisons at all is a difficult task. One must contend with and write against the deep and violent history of stereotypes that cast Black people as both prone to sexual violence and deserving of it. Burton uses the archive to both reveal the sexual atrocities against Black captives and to highlight their own practices of love and care. However, one must also contend with the fact that people who practice love and care can also cause harm.

Burton’s analysis falls short in grappling with the very real real experiences of rape and sexual violence among prisoners. While he does acknowledge that “phallocentric, sexist, and homophobic discourses litter the archive the rebels left behind,” and that “many of them committed acts of gender violence against each other and those in their communities”, the acknowledgment is brief and does not impact his overall . In other parts of the book, certain descriptions of sex and sexuality that seem to have more subtle undercurrents of violence and abuse are presented instead as moments of uncomplicated intimacy and desire. This shortcoming is an important reminder that if not handled with care, some tools can do as much harm as good. We can and must listen to our elders, build community, and engage in mad science without hagiographizing those elders, or sanitizing and flattening the violence done by folks nonetheless still deserving of love and respect.

In contrast, Aisha Beliso-De Jesús models this with extraordinary care in Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a . Beliso-De Jesús listens deeply: to the dead, to their living kin, to the archives, to the skeptics, to those who experience structural violence and to the architects who designed it, and also to herself. In so doing, she weaves together a story that has until now only ever been mistold, and reveals the contours and causes of that mistelling. There are no villains and heroes in this story, only people who cause harm and people who are harmed; and very often people who are both at once.

Despite not being a legitimate medical diagnosis, in 2018 “excited delirium” was listed as the official cause of death in more than 10% of deaths in U.S. police . The so-called syndrome is a fabrication built on racist stereotypes. Those whose deaths are categorized as death by excited delirium were in fact killed by police officers in a variety of more mundane ways: asphyxiation, Taser, ketamine, or blunt force trauma. However on paper, they became excited, delirious, frenzied, and then “just up and .” Sudden death is a symptom of the disease, not the result of deadly violence. Beliso-De Jesús describes the invention of excited delirium as one of many iterations in “ the persistent portrayal of a fabricated archetype: the drug-addled, unhinged, superhuman Black person. This fictitious construct serves as a pretext to justify police violence and racist .”

This topic is likely to resonate with anyone who has lived in the United States in recent decades. From Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown to George Floyd, Black men have been portrayed as unhinged, uncontrollable, and unhuman post-mortem as a means of justifying the actions of their murderers. Beliso-De Jesús tells the story in a way you have not heard before. Readers might remember that in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, Minneapolis police attempted to categorize his death as a case of excited delirium. However, a bystander’s cell phone video showing police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes made this particular falsehood impossible to maintain. While most retellings of Floyd’s death focus on his repeated utterance “I can’t breathe,” Beliso-De Jesús asks the reader to revisit Floyd’s full plea: “Mama, mama, mama. All right. Oh my God! I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe, man. Mama, I love you. Mama, I can’t do ’”. Beliso-De Jesús, a practitioner of Santeria, argues that George Floyd’s mother—only recently deceased herself—was with her son in his final moments, and that her presence is what compelled bystanders to become active witnesses. This commitment to listening to the dead, to being “observant with them” (194), is a key tool to put to . For those not practiced in listening to the dead, a first step is to simply set aside secular skepticism. “What would it do to the research process,” Beliso-De Jesús asks, “if we took seriously Afro-Latiné religious practitioners’ active engagements with the dead? Might it call for a shift in our social scientific methods and also ?” (118)

The book is so beautifully and carefully put together that it is exceedingly difficult to summarize. The chapters weave together ethnography, history, and spiritual encounter in a clear “show your work” style of writing that makes the story easy to follow across those domains of knowledge. Chapters are punctuated with journal entries that serve not only as ethnographic data themselves but also help to show in practical detail the process by which a book project about the criminalization of Afro-Latiné religions became a book about excited delirium. The very first journal entry, for example, recalls a dream in which the spirit of Jeremy Ellis—an interlocutor’s deceased father—maintains an insistent presence. The author wakes with the name “Charles Wetli” in her mind. Charles Wetli is the name of the man who coined the term “excited delirium,” and Jeremy Ellis was murdered by the police—his death categorized not as homicide but as excited delirium.

Such connections abound in the book. Careful listening to the living and the dead allows the book to make connections which are powerful and unsettling. Jeremy Ellis’s insistence that she look deeper into the work of Charles Wetli reveals a deep archive of racist science—what Beliso-De Jesús calls the “racial laboratory”—in which the bodies of deceased Black and Brown people are turned into data to criminalize their living kin: from studies claiming to connect tattoos to criminal activity (a practice mirrored in ICE tactics today) to the cherry-picking of autopsies to create the diagnosis of “cocaine-sex deaths” that would over time morph into “excited delirium,” the investigation into Wetli’s research and writings shows how he “helped to establish a system of white expertise that revolved around the criminalization of deceased Black .” Police and medical examiners’ reports that attribute deaths to excited delirium draw on racist tropes to justify and explain away deadly force. Police and sheriff’s departments are able to avoid investigation by citing excited delirium as a cause of death. It allows Taser Inc. to claim that the weapon they produce is non-fatal, and blame excited delirium instead.And, police and EMTs faced with an agitated Black individual, armed with their miseducation on Black bodies and minds, might see excited delirium and treat the patient, fatally, with ketamine.

This information and more is laid out across the book using a distinct but complementary form of archival analysis to that employed by Burton. Beliso-De Jesús does not create an archive: she allows herself to be guided to and through many different archives by the dead and their living kin, of whom Cissy and George Floyd and Jeremy and Jade Ellis are just two of a multitude, all treated with care and respect. She takes what she learns from them, what she finds in the archive, and moments from her own life that resonate and presents it all back to us, the reader, carefully curated to unsettle and to prompt new connections. Academic work, she tells us in the book’s afterword, “is a form of .”

Attention to the connections and attachments academic work can conjure is another tool to pick up and use, and as Beliso-De Jesús warns, it must be used with care. The afterword tells a story about such conjuring gone wrong that I will not spoil for you, but that serves as an important reminder to conjure with intention. Listening to one’s elders, listening to the spirits of one’s copresent dead, listening to people deemed mad. Building archives, building connections, and building community. These are all tools to pick up and use with care in pursuit of abolitionist projects and practices. Both Tip of the Spear and Excited Delirium describe what they are doing in different moments as “blueprints” if partial ones, for abolition. The books are resources for abolitionist work, they are invitations to it, and they model the types of collaboration necessary to it. Both, I think, are essential reading for anyone seeking to expand their abolitionist toolkit.

About the Reviewer

Kaya N. Williams is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Barnard College.