Corrado Alvaro and the Calabrian mafia: a critical case study of the use of literary and journalistic texts in research on Italian organized crime

Amber Phillips

doi:10.1007/s12117-016-9285-0

Abstract

The Calabrian mafia, or ‘Ndrangheta, is a hugely powerful international crime syndicate, with origins that can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. By far the least studied of Italy’s ‘big three’ mafias, socio-historical research on the earlier stage of the organisation’s history has tended to make extensive use of literary and journalistic texts as source material (see Arlacchi (1983); Ciconte (1992); Paoli (2003)). This paper will present a cautionary example of the importance of interrogating literary and journalistic representations of Italian organized crime sensitively and within context, taking an article written by celebrated Calabrian writer Corrado Alvaro as a case study. It argues that academic perceptions of the early ‘Ndrangheta are, through their reliance on cultural products, impacted by the narratives contained within such texts; a phenomenon which merits further investigation. Further, drawing on cultural memory studies, it argues that, while the accuracy of the representations of the ‘Ndrangheta contained within these texts may be called into question, they do, through their ability to both reflect and shape public opinion, have a valuable contribution to make to our understanding of perceptions of Calabrian organized crime in its native region.

Highlights

Despite being recognized as one of the world’s most powerful criminal organizations (Europol 2013), with origins that can be traced back to the late nineteenth century, the Trends Organ Crim (2017) 20:179–195Calabrian mafia, or ‘Ndrangheta, has only in the last few decades begun to draw substantial attention from the scholarly community
In ‘La fibbia’, ‘Angelino’, and ‘I briganti’, Alvaro clearly implies that the mafia which is active in Calabria in 1955 represents the beginnings of a corrupted, modern incarnation of an honoured society which once enjoyed the consensus of the Calabrian people, embodying their values and traditions
While there are obvious elements of truth in his identification of the socio-economic drivers for mafia recruitment and proliferation, and the changes which were beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, in his portrayals of the early ‘Ndrangheta, Alvaro constructs a myth which glosses over the violent reality

Summary

Introduction

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Conclusions