Giuditta Caliendo

The Camorra and the ‘Ndrangheta, two crime groups from Southern Italy, have only recently gained international visibility following some key events that marked their "Media outbreak". The best seller "Gomorra" (2006) was translated into English in 2007, introducing for the first time to millions of readers the complex structure of Naples’ crime syndicate, the Camorra. The novel also inspired the homonymous internationally acclaimed film (M. Garrone, 2008) and the crime drama series (2014) which generated unprecedented interest about Naples’ criminal organization. Also in 2007, the massacre of six Italian mobsters in Duisburg gave extensive international media coverage to another previously unknown crime syndicate, the Calabrese ‘Ndrangheta, when for the first time a "vendetta" was pursued outside of Italy’s borders.

These events marked a turning point in the way the Camorra and the ‘Ndrangheta started to be represented to the general public. The international media began to give higher visibility to these criminal systems—which until then had been highly underrepresented—and raise public awareness on the process of "transnationalization" (Longo 2010:16) that the Camorra and the ‘Ndrangheta were undergoing, i.e. they were swiftly adapting to a globalized market while maintaining a sub-national and local matrix.

In the light of the above, this study investigates mechanisms of representation of the "lesser-known" mafias beyond Italy’s borders by looking at the audiovisual genre of the expository documentary (Nichols 2001). Documentaries are particularly conducive to our research aims as they do not propose a reproduction of reality, but rather a representation of the world we already occupy. This genre is therefore not merely referential, but can be constitutive of new forms of identity inhabiting the criminal world.

The study draws upon Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), whose central tenet is that discourse is not only socially shaped but also socially "constitutive" (Fairclough 1992) in that it is believed to construct social identities and roles. The study thus relies on CDA to describe the discursive processes involved in the creation and transformation of mafia identities as they shift from a local dimension to a globalized one. Given the multimodal nature of the corpus, the study also draws on the analytical tools of Multimodal Discourse Analysis (Kress/Van Leeuwen 1996, 2001; O’Halloran 2004; Baldry/Thibault 2006; Kress 2010) to analyze the complex interdependencies of written and visual forms of semiosis in constructing criminal identities.