Worrier state

A wide-ranging investigation of cultures of fear in South Africa, this book reveals how fear and its various features manifest in contemporary media forms and the people they serve, and how these are impacted by race, class, gender, space and identity.

The book is intimately interested in the way in which moral panics, mass fears and collective anxieties manifest in circumstances of higher risk, heightened insecurity, deep inequality and accelerated social change.

Spanning a range of imagined communities and physical spaces, it investigates four case studies in which fear and anxiety manifest in radically different ways: the far right myth of ‘white genocide’; so-called ‘Satanist’ murders of young women; an urban legend about township crime; and social theories about safety and goodness in the suburbs.