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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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