![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This essay argues that criminality provides a critical magnifying lens to understand the network of subversive disconnections and disjunctures in postcolonial cities. By connecting the postcolonial city to the discourse on crime, it investigates the specific relations between exploitation, colonisation and the underworld. As crossroads of the different intersections of power determined by colonialism, decolonisation and globalisation (Rashmi Varma, The Postcolonial City and Its Subjects: London, Nairobi, Bombay, London, Routledge, 2011), postcolonial cities expose the many and varied entanglements between the informal economies in the Global North and South, between the legal and the unofficial. Starting with the assumption that colonialism is predicated upon the principles of Western modernity, this essay frames criminal organisations as forces acting in opposition to and in concurrence with the state. Whereas the discourses on criminality are conventionally employed to reinforce processes of ‘Othering’ and racialisation in fringe locations, they also have the potential to unveil the ‘hidden truths’ of Western urban modernity. To this end, this essay employs Christ Stopped at Eboli (Carlo Levi, London: Penguin, 1947), a novel that unveils the links between exploitation and illegality. The society portrayed in the text shows the manifestations of an ‘unauthorised modernity’ (Iain Chambers, Postcolonial Interruptions: Unauthorized Modernity, London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017); an alternative view of development that refashions the meaning of what is conventionally regarded as legal and accepted.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Note on contributor
Maria Ridda is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent. She has published extensively on postcolonial theory, South Asian writing, and on the Mediterranean. Her first monograph Imagining Bombay, London, New York and Beyond (Peter Lang, 2015) explored how urban representations of the three cities are shaped by colonialism, postcolonialism and globalisation. Her second monograph, Criminality and Power in the Postcolonial City, is under contract with the series Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures. Through a comparison of Mumbai and Naples, it investigates how the recent rise of transnational criminal organisations challenges conventional representations and imaginings of the postcolonial and world city.
Notes
1 Jean Comaroff and John L Comaroff (eds), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, p 66.
2 John Hagedorn (ed), ‘Introduction’, Gangs in the Global City: Alternatives to Traditional Criminology, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2007, pp 1–11, p 3.
3 Rashmi Varma, The Postcolonial City and its Subjects: London, Nairobi, Bombay, London, Routledge, 2011. Maria Ridda, Imagining Bombay, London, New York and beyond: South Asian Diasporic Writing from 1990 to the Present, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015.
4 Rita Segato in Gert Melville and Carlos Ruta (eds), Thinking the Body as a Basis, Provocation and Burden of Life: Studies in Intercultural and Historical Contexts, Vol. 2, Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2015, p 227.
5 Anibal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’, Nepantla: Views from the South 1(3), 2000, pp 533–580, p 533.
6 Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, London: Penguin, 1947.
7 Iain Chambers, Postcolonial Interruptions: Unauthorized Modernity, London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017.
8 A revisionist thread of Italian history argues that the South of Italy was subject to internal colonisation by the Piedmontese Government in 1860. For further details, see Valeria Deplano and Alessandro Pes, Quel che resta dell’impero: la cultura coloniale degli italiani, Florence: Mimesis, 2016, pp 149–167; Maria Ridda, ‘The Siren’s Children: Rethinking Postcolonial Naples’, Interventions, 27 January 2017, pp 467–486, doi:10.1080/1369801X.2016.1277153.
9 Jean Comaroff and John L Comaroff, The Truth About Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, pp 2–3.
10 Comaroff and Comaroff, The Truth About Crime, p 3.
11 Olson, Mancur, ‘Dictatorship, democracy, and development’, American Political Science Review 87(3), 1993, pp 567–576.
12 Comaroff and Comaroff, The Truth About Crime, p 5.
13 Comaroff and Comaroff(eds), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, p 11.
14 Comaroff and Comaroff (eds), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, p 66.
15 Achille Mbembe, ‘On Politics as a form of expenditure’, in Jean Comaroff and John L Comaroff (eds), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, pp 299–335.
16 Colin McFarlane, ‘Metabolic inequalities in Mumbai: Beyond telescopic urbanism’, City 17(4), 2013, pp 498–503, p 503.
17 Jean Comaroff and John LComaroff, Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa, London and New York: Routledge, 2015, p 45.
18 Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, p 45.
19 Saskia Sassen, ‘The Global City: One Setting for New Types of Gang Work and Political Culture?’, in John Hagedorn (ed), Gangs in the Global City: Alternatives to traditional criminology, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2007, pp 97–119, p 101.
20 Antonio Gramsci, in Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (eds), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, New York: International Publishers, 1987, p 52.
21 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, p 53.
22 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London and New York: Verso, 2006, p 10.
23 Davis, Planet of Slums, p 11.
24 Rita Segato in Gert Melville and Carlos Ruta (eds), Thinking the Body as a Basis, Provocation and Burden of Life p 227.
25 Comaroff and Comaroff (eds), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, p 66.
26 Comaroff and Comaroff, The Truth About Crime, pp 6–7.
27 Comaroff and Comaroff, The Truth About Crime, p 14.
28 Max Weber, ‘Politikals Beruf’ in H H Gerth and C Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press, 1946, pp 77–128
29 Laurent Fouchard, ‘Between World History and State Formation’, The Journal of African History, 52(2), pp 123–248, p 240.
30 Fouchard, ‘Between World History and State Formation’, p240.
31 Fouchard, ‘Between World History and State Formation’, p 227
32 Fouchard, ‘Between World History and State Formation’, p 244.
33 John Connel, ‘Regulation of Space in the Contemporary Postcolonial Pacific City: Port Moresby and Suva’, Asia Pacific View Point, 15 December 2003, pp 243–257.
34 Connell, ‘Regulation of Space in the Contemporary Postcolonial Pacific City’, p252.
35 Connell, ‘Regulation of Space in the Contemporary Postcolonial Pacific City’, p 252.
36 Francesco Palmieri, Il libro napoletano dei morti, Milano: Mondadori, 2012, p 89.
37 Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms, London: Verso, 1983.
38 Chris Cunneen, ‘Postcolonial Perspectives for Criminology’, in Bosworth and C Hoyle (eds), What Is Criminology?, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p 257.
39 Cunneen, ‘Postcolonial Perspectives for Criminology’, p257.
40 Cunneen, ‘Postcolonial Perspectives for Criminology’, p 258.
41 As the capital of the Kingdom of the two Sicilies, Naples was occupied by the Piedmontese Government in 1860. Valeria Deplano and Alessandro Pes, Quel che resta dell’impero: la cultura coloniale degli italiani, Florence: Mimesis, 2016, pp 149–167; Maria Ridda, ‘The Siren’s Children: Rethinking Postcolonial Naples’, Interventions, 27 January 2017, pp 467–486, DOI:10.1080/1369801X.2016.1277153.
42 See for example the film Napoli, Palermo, New York: il triangolo della Camorra, Dir: Afonso Brescia, 1981. All the songs by the Neapolitan singer Nino D’Angelo can be assembled under the rubric of partenopop.
43 The Italian Southern Question was framed by Antonio Gramsci in 1924 as the economic and social disparity that characterized the regions of the South of Italy exploited by the North. See Antonio Gramsci, ‘Some aspects of the southern question’, Selection from Politics Writings (1921–1926) (1978).
44 Isaia Sales, Le strade della violenza: malviventi e bande di camorra a Napoli, Napoli, L’ancora del mediterraneo, 2006, p 24.
45 See Ridda, ‘The Siren’s Children’.
46 Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’, p533.
47 Chambers, Postcolonial Interruptions: Unauthorized Modernity, p 13.
48 See, for example, the Caribbean of Edouard Glissant, the Asia of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, or the Latin America of Walter Mignolo.
49 Chambers, Postcolonial Interruptions: Unauthorized Modernity, p 13.
50 Chambers, Postcolonial Interruptions: Unauthorized Modernity, p 80.
51 Paraphrased from Chambers, Postcolonial Interruptions: Unauthorized Modernity, p 70.
52 Cunneen, ‘Postcolonial Perspectives for Criminology’, pp 249–261, p 257.
53 Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, p 70. As Roberto Derobertis puts it, ‘Although Levi recognized Lucania's capacity to oppose “paternal prevailing institutions”, the region remained essentially shapeless …' Roberto Derobertis, ‘A Postcolonial Perspective on Carlo Levi's Cristo si è fermato a Eboli and Southern Italy Today' in Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, eds, Postcolonial Italy, Challenging National Homogeneity, New York: Palgrave, 2012, p. 162 (pp. 157–170).
54 Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, p 11.
55 Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, p 49.
56 Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, p 78.
57 Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000, p 8.
58 Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, pp 136–137.
59 Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, p 137.
60 Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, p 36.
61 Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, p 71.
62 Élite soldier of the Royal Italian Army (my own translation).
63 Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, p 19.
64 Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, p 51.
65 Although Levi is generally aware of Gagliano’s subalternity, he occasionally falls into the trap of distancing himself from the place’s inhabitants. Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, p 11.
66 Albert Camus, The Rebel, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, p 250.
67 Camus, The Rebel, p 250.
68 Chambers, Postcolonial Interruptions: Unauthorized Modernity, p 13.
69 Cunneen, ‘Postcolonial Perspectives for Criminology’, pp 249–261, p 257.
70 Rita Segato in Gert Melville and Carlos Ruta (eds), Thinking The Body as a Basis, Provocation and Burden of Life, p 22.
71 Arif Dirlik, ‘The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism’, Critical inquiry 20(2), 1994, pp 328–356.
72 Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’, p533.
73 Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’, p533.