From the “Neapolitan Westerns” to Marrazzo’s Il camorrista: The Dawn of the Global Camorra and the Crisis of Representation

In this article, I examine “Made in Naples” cultural products that chronicle the socio-economic impact of the structural transformations of the Camorra criminal organization in the late-1970s, while simultaneously providing insight into the crisis of representation in the era of multinational capitalism. I focus on films—the so-called “Neapolitan westerns”—that represent a kind of live coverage of the Camorra’s evolution by blending different cinematic genres. I also analyze Giuseppe Marrazzo’s hybrid text Il camorrista (1984). This nonfiction novel drew on the author’s decade of intense fieldwork and created the conditions for the development of new crime fiction later perfected in the early 2000s by Nanni Balestrini and Roberto Saviano.