In the last years of apartheid, white South African society found itself in the grip of previously unimaginable social and political change, which sometimes manifested in morbid cultural symptoms. This book considers two of those symptoms, a pair of matched moral panics that appeared in the contemporary media and in popular literature. It argues that excessive reactions to the apparent threat posed by a cult of white Satanists, never proven to exist, and to a so-called epidemic of white family murder reveal important truths about fear, violence and resistance, as well as fragmentations within the poles of white South African identity: nationalism, gender, history, the family, even whiteness itself. Together, the Satanism scare and the family murder 'epidemic' draw a compelling picture of the psychic landscape of white culture at the end of apartheid, revealing both pathological responses to social change and the brutalising effects that apartheid had on those who benefited from it most.
- ISBN10 1349571962
- ISBN13 9781349571963
- Publish Date 14 January 2014
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Out of Print 13 April 2017
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Palgrave MacMillan
- Edition 2015 ed.
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 223
- Language English