[Commlist] New book: Worrier State

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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