WORRIER STATE, risk, anxiety and moral panic in South Africa

244pp., paperback, Johannesburg, 2022

Nicky Falkof presents four case studies to demonstrate how risk, anxiety and moral panic appear in media portrayals in contemporary South Africa: the far right myth of ‘white genocide’; so-called ‘Satanist’ murders of young women; urban legends about township crime, and theories about safety and goodness in the suburbs.

"This stunning book resonates with climates of fear far beyond South Africa in how it magnifies the tensions and intimacies between embodied experience and the lingering history and threat of violence. This is a powerful and difficult book to write, and to write this well."
Samantha Pinto, author of Infamous Bodies: Early Black women’s celebrity and the afterlives of rights

"Original and refreshing, Falkof’s book is a must read for those of us interested in understanding contemporary formations of race and power in the global South and the role of the media in framing these debates. This study is critically needed in this moment of increasing worldwide white nationalism." Xavier Livermon, author of Kwaito Bodies: Remastering space and subjectivity in post-apartheid South Africa

Nicky Falkof is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.