ABSTRACT

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 move. 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.

chapter |23 pages

Introduction

Global Moral Panics and the Affective Contours of Power

part I|103 pages

The Coloniality of Panic

chapter 1|18 pages

Privateers and Public Ends

Piracy as Global Moral Panic

chapter 2|22 pages

Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness

Responses to Children’s Militarization in Uganda and the US

chapter 3|20 pages

Ebola

Keywords

chapter 4|21 pages

A Panicky Atmosphere

On the Coloniality of Climate Change

chapter 5|20 pages

The Panic over Human Smuggling

From the Nineteenth-Century Coolie Trade to Today’s Migrants

part II|91 pages

Too Mobile

chapter 6|13 pages

Rescuing the Blonde Angel

The Global Captivity Narrative and the Panic of 2013

chapter 7|14 pages

The Everywhere Drug War

Narcoterror and the Global Flows of the Methamphetamine Imaginary

chapter 8|21 pages

Black Bodies, Wrong Places

Rolezinho, Moral Panic, and Racialized Male Subjects in Brazil

chapter 9|20 pages

Circulating Sin

Sailors and Benevolence in Early Nineteenth-Century New York

chapter 10|21 pages

Transnational Securityscapes

Central American (Immigrant) Youth and the “Military Option”

part III|77 pages

Resisting Rescue

chapter 11|21 pages

Stop the Woman, Save the State

Policing, Order, and the Black Woman’s Body

chapter 12|20 pages

“Modern-Day Slavery”

The Analogy Problem in Human Trafficking Reform

chapter 13|11 pages

Saving Love

Compassion, Desire, Violence, and Deceit in Late Capitalism

chapter 14|23 pages

“And Still We Rise”

Moral Panics, Dark Sousveillance, and Politics Otherwise in the New New Orleans