Contemporary Representations
of Organised Crime in Italy and Beyond
An
interdisciplinary conference dedicated to the memory of Dr. Tom Behan,
a leading authority on
Italian organised crime
University of Kent, June 2011
Journalist: Were you impressed with Gomorrah?
Dr. Tom Behan: I was, because one of
the irritating things for me as someone who tries to teach students about the
mafia and the Camorra is that if anyone’s got any understanding about the mafia
it comes from films like The
Godfather and TV shows like The
Sopranos.
This is a film that is very
different from that. It tells an accurate picture, an awful, unglamourised
picture, because, simply, that’s what it’s like. This film will give people a
reality check - these criminals are not nice, romantic, unflawed people…
they’re lying murderers. You’re thrown in without any explanation, and
it’s so chilling because of it – but this is really how people live their lives
in Naples.
04 February 2009
In 1969, Mario Puzo published what was to become an
all-time bestseller, transformed into a widely acclaimed film a few years later
by Francis Ford Coppola. Since The
Godfather in 1972, mass audiences in the United States have been bombarded
with a succession of novels, films and ultimately TV series that made of the
figure of the Mafia boss a distinctive and recurrent character in American
popular culture. As Caryn James claims, the recent huge success of the Sopranos TV series provides with a clear
example of how ‘feeling inside a mafia family has become [in the United States]
a cultural touchstone’. According to Robin Pickering-Iazzi, because of the wide-ranging
circulation of American cultural products, this ‘viewing [of] mafiosi exclusively through the lens of
American novels and films contributes to the tendency to take popular images of
the mafia and the criminal association that bear the same name and operates in
Italian territory for one and the same thing’. She goes on to observe how such
a tendency ‘encourages the inclination to collapse crucial distinctions between
images of the Mafia as produced by the American cultural imagination and the
various perceptions and meanings of it in Italian culture’.
The aim of this conference is to scrutinise
contemporary representations of organised crime in literature and cinema, with
a focus on Italian and Hollywoodian production, possibly stimulating a
comparison of the two.
We would like to encompass a variety of approaches
(historical, sociological, theoretical, journalistic) while at the same time
trying to ascertain the distinctive cultural practices that define Hollywood
and Italian cinematography dealing with this topic.
We would welcome proposals that:
We strongly encourage the submission of proposals
that widely contextualise the political and social background of the analysed
film(s) and/or book(s). By so doing, we hope to answer the following questions:
· What is the ultimate goal of films and/or books
dealing with organised crime? Is it to entertain or to educate, or perhaps
both? In other words, are these works to be considered as a mere exploitation
of a social plague or – especially in Italy – do they also aim at awakening
social awareness, generally unresponsive to such problems? Is it always
possible to discern the line between commercial exploitation and the will to
inform?
· Do cinema and literature represent an effective
means by which to fight organised crime? Or do they more often than not
contribute to a romanticisation of the mobsters’ world, no matter how realistic
these portrayals are or claim to be?
· In which ways are Italian and Italian-American
organised crime differently represented?
· Many Hollywoodian representations of organised
crime have been widely acclaimed, abroad as well as in Italy. In other specific
cases, the Italian audience reacted with a stubborn rejection of the work in
question (e.g. The Godfather vs. The Sopranos). What are the
sociological and cultural reasons that could explain this difference of response?
Neither of the
above lists is exhaustive or prescriptive, and we encourage submissions that
deal with films and/or books, not necessarily the ones listed in the CFP, and
which explore pertinent topics that can be different from the ones herein mentioned.
We are glad to welcome submissions from any disciplinary area of the
humanities.
Paper proposals
should not exceed the 350 words, and should include a CV of the speaker.
For submissions
and information: [log in to unmask].