Panic Transnational Cultural Studies and the Affective Contours of Power

<p>This volume explores the panic that is a central affective register of our current international order. Fears of Somali pirates Gypsy kidnappers African warlords Ebola Mexican meth pimps coyotes gangs climate refugees and more structure the dark side of a metropolitan unconscious. These are terrors over things that (might) cross borders threatening the sanctity of territoriality and capital. Inspired by scholarship challenging panics around human and sex trafficking the contributors to this volume develop the umbrella category of the global moral panic. Embracing the challenge of grasping a phenomenon not previously regarded as cohering they consider panics provoked by travel passage transgression; panics over bodies that <i>move</i>. Like panics over trafficking the episodes narrated here ride and feed a field of common sense regarding crime rights and state power. Their logics of victims and villains nourish notions of the centrality of punishment drawing from and feeding taxonomies of gender race and nation solidifying the order craved by capital. They spotlight the coloniality of power the ongoing salience of empire the savior logics of rescue and the profound sexism organizing hierarchies of bodies and places. Panic this volume diagnoses is a crucial undertheorized facet of contemporary local-global relations.</p>