Archive for 2022

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[Commlist] New book: Worrier State

Mon Jul 25 09:51:12 GMT 2022




Nicky Falkof is pleased to be able to share the recent publication of the new book, /Worrier State: Risk, anxiety and moral panic in South Africa/ (Manchester UP <https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526164025/>/Wits UP <https://witspress.co.za/catalogue/worrier-state/'>). The description is below. He's hopeful that the book will be useful to media and cultural studies scholars outside South Africa who are interested in race, affect/emotion, cultures of fear, moral panic and related social and media forms. Please get in touch with him directly ((nicky.falkof /at/ wits.ac.za) <mailto:(nicky.falkof /at/ wits.ac.za)>) if you’re interested in reviewing or discussing in seminars, book talks or guest lectures.

/Worrier State: Risk, anxiety and moral panic in South Africa/ is concerned with powerful social phenomena that recur under late capitalism, what Zygmunt Bauman called ‘cultures of fear’. These collective states of persistent negative emotion rest on a shared sense that we are not safe, that something out there – something /other/ – threatens us in existential ways. Much of the scholarly writing on cultures of fear focuses on the wealthy nations of the global north. The south, and Africa in particular, is often dismissed as merely the source of the fears that plague northern citizens, from terrorists and immigrants to novel diseases and environmental threats. These astonishingly colonial representations treat Africa as a homogenous continent of teeming hordes and bad hygiene. But what happens if we think about cultures of fear within rather than about South Africa? How does fear intersect with economic precarity, inequality, violence and the ongoing consequences of racial capitalism? What happens to the contemporary explosion of moral panics, urban legends and other paranoid narratives when they manifest here? /Worrier State/ approaches these questions using four disparate case studies: the far-right myth of ‘white genocide’; so-called satanist murders of young women; fear of crime in a Johannesburg township; and social theories about risk in the suburbs.


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