Dying Bodies and Living Citizens: Organized Crime in Contemporary Mexican and Italian Literature
Embargo until
2022-08-01
Date
2018-07-16
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Publisher
Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
Organized crime has a long-established history in both Mexico and Italy. Nevertheless, barring a few exceptions, literary works that draw attention to the phenomenon start to emerge in both countries only in the 1950s, with such representations ballooning exponentially over the following decades. The scholarship on this literary production is even more recent and critics have tended to focus on a single author, a geographical area, a historical phase, or a particular genre.
Despite some differences between the incarnations of organized crime in Mexico and in Italy, these structures have, from their inception, followed similar trajectories and have pervaded the recent history of these two countries. My work seeks to trace the evolution of organized criminality in Mexico and Italy through the literary production that has emerged from these separate yet parallel contexts. Literary fictions represent the cultural production of a given territory, providing unique testimonies of how the history, politics, economy, and population of a region become profoundly interwoven with the presence of organized crime. Through such an analysis, I seek to demonstrate the increasing pervasiveness of these criminal phenomena as well as to propose that organized crime has become a constituent component of national culture and national identity in each country.
The first chapter of my work establishes the philosophical and theoretical framework of my research in regard to notions of violence, legality, and power as dissected by Machiavelli, Paz, Agamben, Benjamin, and Derrida. Chapter Two analyzes literary works set in Mexico and Italy between the 1950s and 1960s. These narratives attest to the pervasive presence of organized crime in these countries’ rural areas in a watershed historical moment for organized criminality. The third chapter focuses on urban space as the new, main landscape for criminal activities, and criminal fictions, during the 1970s and 1980s. This phase of rampant industrialization and urbanization coincides with the structural re-ordering of organized crime. The fourth and last chapter studies the current status of criminal organizations by considering novels set in the past three decades, during which time borders have become increasingly politicized but decreasingly rigid, thus contributing to the trans-national expansion of organized crime.
My analysis of Mexican and Italian literary works illustrates to what degree organized crime has corrupted these contemporary societies, becoming de facto one of the elements of their national identities. It also demonstrates the invaluable testimony that fictional representations of organized crime provide as this noxious phenomenon—one for which written evidence is scant, and cultural impact is difficult to gauge with traditional methods—has taken root, and blossomed, in both Mexico and Italy. My work establishes the circumstances which have led to such criminal corruption, while at the same time providing new angles from which to understand, and to fight, this threat at multiple levels.
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Keywords
Mexican Literature, Italian Literature, Mexico, Italy