Worrier State: Risk, anxiety and moral panic in South Africa (Manchester University Press/Wits University Press) 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, often projected onto a disavowed outsider, 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 still routinely dismissed as the source of the fears that plague northern citizens. These astonishingly colonial representations persist in both liberal and authoritarian contexts. In the case of South Africa, what happens if we think about cultures of fear within rather than about this country? How does the contemporary explosion of moral panics, urban legends and other paranoid narratives manifest here, and how does fear intersect with economic precarity, inequality, violence and the ongoing consequences of racial capitalism?

SARChI Chair in Gender Politics

Invitation to a Book launch at Oude Leeskamer, Stellenbosch. 

Biography: Nicky Falkof is an associate professor of Media Studies at Wits University. She is also the author of The End of Whiteness: Satanism and family murder in late apartheid South Africa and co-editor of Anxious Joburg: The inner lives of a global south city and Intimacy and Injury: In the wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa.

Discussants: Prof Louise du Toit, Department of Philosophy and Ms Tamlyn February, MA student in Philosophy

Facilitator: Prof Amanda Gouws