L eonardo Sciascia was one of the most influential Southern Italian novelists, folklorists, and political voices of the late twentieth century. Rising to international prominence in the 1960s, he penned ironic, vivid portraits of post-Second World War Sicily, such as The Day of the Owl (2003 [1961]) and To Each His Own (1966). With biting satire, these novels expose the everyday intrigues and favor exchanges that link local mobsters, businessmen, public officials, and ordinary citizens within shared patronage networks. Sciascia broke an important taboo: his novels were among the first in Italy to name the Mafia directly. Yet he refused to reduce Sicilian organized crime to a mere question of law and order, portraying it as a web of socio-cultural practices substantially enmeshed with the island’s political life (Pogliaghi 2005).
Despite Sciascia’s widespread acclaim, his disillusioned portrayal of Southern Italian politics provoked considerable controversy. Several mainstream literary critics, anti-Mafia activists, and political party cadres of the time (including those of the Italian Communist Party, of which he was a member) accused him of presenting essentialist, orientalizing views of Southern Italian society (Schneider and Schneider 1998: 254). Critics also accused Sciascia of legitimizing organized crime, which he depicted not as an external menace to the state but as a brutal yet integral component of Italy’s public sphere (Lo Verme 2006: 41).
These accusations rankled the novelist. Determined to silence his detractors, he turned to history, convinced that only a meticulous reconstruction of the Mafia’s roots could vindicate his argument (La Repubblica 2017). In the early 1970s, he wrote La Storia della Mafia (“History of the Mafia”) (2013), a history essay tracing the cartel’s rise from the eighteenth century and revealing its enduring entanglement with industrial magnates, working-class communities, and the public administrators who had long governed his native Sicily.
In his essay, Sciascia (2013) defines the Sicilian Mafia (and any other comparable criminal network) as “a secret society aiming to illicitly increase the wealth of its affiliates, while playing a parasitical role of mediation (usually achieved through violence) between property and labour, production and consumption, state and citizens” (12).1 Crucially, he insists that the existence of “Mafia” organizations is not a uniquely Sicilian or Italian phenomenon. The Sicilian Mafia’s expansion to the US in the 1920s, for instance, becomes for him a case study in criminal adaptability: a demonstration of how its capacity to mediate between (and siphon wealth from) many political and economic entities at once, including the state, flourishes in environments marked by rapid industrialization, individualizing forms of populist mobilization, and poorly regulated labor markets (36). In these settings, the predatory logic of organized crime “overlaps with the mechanisms driving the most advanced forms of capitalism” (38).
Sciascia’s view of the Mafia did little to win over his critics. For decades, the combined resistance of Italy’s cultural elites, public authorities, and publishing houses kept his monograph locked away, unpublished. Only in 2013 (more than twenty years after Sciascia’s death) did an independent press finally bring it to light. By then, his analysis felt uncannily timely, its insights cutting into the very heart of contemporary debates on power, corruption, cultural production, and the state. At the time, I had recently moved for the first time to Naples, Southern Italy, to conduct an ethnography on the forms of surveillance and control exercised by the Camorra (a local criminal organization) on regional media outlets and their socio-cultural outcomes. I learned about the publication of Sciascia’s essay from a brief article tucked away in the final pages of a national newspaper, which I was browsing just before heading to an anti-Camorra demonstration.
Despite its marginal placement in the news, the story stayed with me. In many ways, Sciascia’s essay and the ethnography informing this book shared a common ambition: to expose the central role that organized crime plays as a mediator in late capitalist democracies like the Italian Republic; specifically, its capacity to “parasitically mediate” the economic interests, political narratives, and cultural sensibilities of multiple social classes at once, ultimately influencing the inner functioning of the state-regulated public sphere.
Sciascia pursued this aim through ironic reconstructions of the informal collusion linking Italian civil society, public institutions, and the Sicilian Mafia. My ethnographic work in Naples (both the fieldwork I was conducting at the time and the numerous projects that followed, including this book) examined the mechanisms of cultural production through which local organized crime engages with the Italian public sphere via its entanglements with analog and digital media industries. In this, we converged on a further point: organized crime is not sustained solely by professional mobsters through violence, bribery, and racketeering. It is also reproduced through cultural production processes, such as those emerging from the Neapolitan mediascape, hinging upon the consent of noncriminal actors.
The divide between Sciascia and his critics might have been indeed reconciled by the terms employed by many Neapolitans to discuss organized crime in everyday conversations. Since my first fieldwork trip in Naples, I noticed that the locals did not use a singular term to address it. When talking about the organization that directly coordinates the activities of Neapolitan professional mobsters, most of my local interlocutors used the term Camorra (a word that also means “bribe” in the local language). But when referring to the patronage networks these mobsters wove with nonaffiliated people, including figures embedded within state institutions, they often preferred ‘o Sistema (the System), a term underscoring the Camorra’s role as a mediator across all spheres of Neapolitan public life (Saviano 2006: 49).
This distinction mirrors the conceptual disagreement at the heart of the long-standing dispute between Sciascia and his critics. To his detractors, criminal organizations are deviant outliers, coalitions of “external enemies” of the liberal state composed of robbers, racketeers, murderers, and drug traffickers. Sciascia, however, and the Neapolitan language alike, depict them as extended relational milieus of exploitation and violence, parasitically embedded within both private and public institutions. Within these milieus, people from different social groups negotiate their life conditions and overall relationship with the state-regulated public sphere through the financially self-interested mediation of mobsters, thereby reinforcing the very structures of privilege at the heart of the capitalist status quo.
As such, the notion of “mediation,” which I adopt from Eisenlohr (2009) as “the objects and processes linking opposed or otherwise differing people, concepts or social formations and activities across qualitative, spatial or temporal gaps” (274), offers a particularly apt lens for understanding the politics of organized crime. In this book, I use this term as an umbrella concept to capture three interconnected types of socio-cultural dynamics that organized crime sets in motion. First, there are acts of so-called collusion, in which criminal cartels cooperate with state-regulated institutions to pursue shared profits and goals, whether directly or indirectly. Second, there are networks of social relations and clientelist favors exchange through which private citizens seek economic gain, public visibility, or upward mobility via the violent intercession of professional mobsters. Third, there are processes of cultural production that reach socially diverse audiences through shared access to organized-crime-managed, sponsored, or otherwise backed media outlets.
Recognizing the interconnection among these three types of organized crime mediation is crucial for understanding Italian and global subaltern politics, especially due to the growing tendency to participate in the public life of neoliberal democracies through highly mediatized populist imaginaries and forms of civic engagement based on media consumption (Cody 2013; Chatterjee 2004; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). This mediatization of politics, coupled with broader access to the Internet and online social media networking, has become a driving force behind the growing support for populist movements among the lower classes worldwide (Mazzarella 2020; Arvidson 2006). As Laclau (2005) argues, populism is a modality of political communication through which diversely empowered social groups engage with the public sphere as a unified body (“the people”), bound together by a shared antagonism versus other groups (minorities, the so-called “establishment”), whom they culturally interpret as external to “the people” itself. Due to these characteristics, contemporary populism, along with the degrees of structural violence it fosters in current democratic societies, inherently hinges on mediation processes to bring together hegemonic and subaltern actors within common political narratives.
How do organized crime modalities of mediation make it harder to tell the difference between legal and illegal ways of taking part in the politics of Naples, Italy, and beyond? How do the forms of publicity fostered by organized-crime-sponsored media, in tandem with the political narratives they spread, intersect with those promoted by state-regulated media? How can they turn contemporary organized crime into a culturally legitimized neoliberal and populist System of public relationality? How can they merge into common subaltern politics? And with what effects on society? This book will address these questions through the ethnographic exploration of the Camorra-sponsored media industries of Naples, alongside the cultural production practices that characterize the current Italian state-regulated mediascape.
My ethnography will illustrate how populist mediation processes go beyond the official political systems of the countries they involve, replicating themselves within various extralegal political entities, including the criminal cartels that dominate Italian and global social peripheries, by targeting similar lower-class audiences and engaging in parallel processes of publicity formation through shared media platforms. By addressing this topic, I will show how the Camorra-sponsored media outlets of Naples provide the local poor with highly controversial tools to engage in exploitative forms of mediation with the Italian neoliberal public sphere, ultimately shaping them into populist political actors.
As Sciascia (2023) foresaw, this capacity takes on particular weight in settings where information technologies are embedded in particularly harsh capitalist divisions of labor, a dynamic that comes sharply into focus in contemporary Italy and, more broadly, across today’s neoliberal democracies. In these contexts, the production, circulation, and marketing of media content tend to elevate structural inequalities into dominant narratives (Hall 1997; Anderson 1984; Benjamin 1969 [1935]). These narratives, in turn, contribute to transforming state–citizen relationships into tools of indirect governance and socio-economic exploitation, depending on how media producers and audiences engage with each other through struggles or compromises along class lines (Abu-Lughod 2004; Arextaga 1999).
Building on this framework, Warner (2002) famously developed the concept of counter-publics, audiences defined by their shared opposition to the dominant standards of mediation upheld by mainstream institutions (63). Rejecting the hegemonic norms that discipline mainstream media aesthetics and likewise resisting them in their patterns of media consumption, counter-publics disrupt dominant narratives by embracing alternative forms of mediation (67). The ongoing tensions between mainstream publics and counter-publics inform the political life of contemporary democracies, giving rise to grassroots “cultural wars” that moderate the harsher effects of class conflict by creating spaces where subaltern groups exercise unmediated agency via ongoing activities of media production and consumption (81).
Nevertheless, the concept of counter-publics falls short of fully capturing the forms of publicity experienced by current Neapolitan lower-class media audiences. The creative ways in which these communities engage with Camorra-sponsored media content reveal that their actions are not driven solely by outright antagonism toward hegemonic cultural producers. Rather, these interactions unfold through Camorra-mediated patterns of compromise and negotiation, fostering exploitative (if not blatantly violent) processes of social mobility that reinforce the political dominance of organized crime over its publics in both populist and neoliberal terms. Similar processes might indeed also occur within the realm of state-regulated media content. As I will show, the political imaginaries and cultural production practices permeating the Camorra-backed media industries do not constitute a real threat against those regulated by Italian state power, sharing neoliberal features and populist outcomes with them.
To explore these dynamics, I have developed the concept of subaltern publicity. This term defines the conditions of publicity experienced by those who live in the shadow of the dominant forces that inform media discourse. Unlike counter-publics, subaltern publics do not seek open confrontation against those exercising legal or illegal forms of cultural hegemony through media control. Instead, they navigate such conflicts through informal mediations. Subaltern publics constitute controversial populist arenas where illicit political actors such as the Camorra assert their dominance over mediation processes that induce their lower-class audience to engage with the public sphere in opposition to their enemies and rivals. But they also provide capitalist arenas, insofar as criminal media industries constitute small “markets” between the poor and the wealthy, where gifting and violence, economic predation and useful social relations, speculation and social capital redistribution coexist and influence each other. Conditions of subaltern publicity like those fostered by the Camorra-sponsored Neapolitan media industries might even end up serving the reproduction of the neoliberal public sphere itself (along with the degrees of inequality and violence permeating it) as cultural, political, and economic infrastructures, through which marketable goods and people, economic relations, personal connections, and affects flow through loosely regulated mediations.
As noted earlier, however, the mediation processes that give rise to subaltern forms of publicity are not limited to professional criminals. Rather, they permeate the public sphere of capitalist democracies as a whole, often co-involving institutional actors and state-regulated media operators. A clear example of this is the decades-long suppression of Sciascia’s essay. Editors did not block its publication due to scholarly doubts, as the work was recognized as rigorous long after the author’s death, but under informal pressure from literary critics, anti-Mafia NGOs, and political parties eager to prevent the spread of analyses revealing the underworld’s central role in Italian politics and economies (La Repubblica 2017). In this way, state-regulated media agencies strategically influenced national discourses on organized crime through informal schemes and behind-the-scenes deals, which mirror those described by Sciascia in his novels and intertwine the Mafia’s discursive power with the state itself and its audiences.
These opaque forms of political mediation echo those shaping the subaltern publics of most local media industries operating within the social peripheries of contemporary Italy, such as the lower-class neighborhoods of Naples. Organized crime holds a parasitic grip on the political economies of these historically marginalized areas (Gramsci 2006 [1926]; Schneider 1998), arriving to manage an estimated 10 percent of Italy’s current GDP (ISTAT 2016: 234). Pressed by the need to reinvest this wealth the Camorra heavily sponsored Neapolitan local media outlets over the last thirty years, establishing a near-monopoly over the circulation of explicitly populist pop songs, films, TV shows, and, more recently, digital content (Pine 2012; De Pascale 2012; Ravveduto 2007, 2023). In turn, these forms of media control open informal pathways for lower-class audiences and aspiring media performers to enter the local media industries in search of fame, wealth, and social mobility, reflecting similar mechanisms that govern the national cultural sector. Against this backdrop, my ethnography will reveal how the neoliberal and populist modalities of cultural production that engender the Camorra-sponsored Neapolitan mediascape reproduce organized crime culture at the local level, positioning the Camorra as what many Neapolitans regard as a Systemic force within contemporary Italian society.
Building on this foundation, the following sections of this chapter will set the stage for examining Camorra-led media politics within the broader context of the Italian state’s neglect of its social peripheries. I will begin by returning to November 2013, when I first learned about the posthumous publication of Sciascia’s essay and took part in an anti-Camorra rally. My thick description of that protest will open the door to a socio-historical analysis of the Neapolitan (and more broadly Italian) mediation contexts central to this book. From there, I will outline the research methods guiding my work and provide a concise summary of its key findings.
On 16 November 2013, around 120,000 protesters assembled in Naples to condemn alleged collusion between the Italian state, major corporations from Northern Italy and Europe, and the Camorra. The rally was one of the most significant and well-attended demonstrations against organized crime in Neapolitan history (La Repubblica 2013). It brought together various activist groups from diverse ideological backgrounds, united in their shared outrage over a “scoop” revealed by the infotainment national TV show “Le Iene”2 (The Hyenas).
Starting in August 2013, the widely popular TV program aired a series of interviews with Carmine Schiavone, a former Camorra boss arrested in 1997 who had been cooperating with the Italian justice system since the following year (Toffa 2013a, 2013b). During prime time, Schiavone revealed that the outskirts of Naples and the nearby city of Caserta had been caught up in a toxic and radioactive waste trafficking network spanning over fifteen years, resulting in a sharp rise in cancer rates among local residents. This illicit trade involved Northern Italian and European corporations eager to cut waste disposal costs, with the Camorra serving as a ruthless waste management service (Moccia 2014). Schiavone claimed that his organization operated these hazardous activities with complete impunity, protected by deep political connections within powerful sectors of the Italian state (Toffa 2013b).
To back up these claims, Schiavone accused the state of deliberately hiding these ecological crimes via strict media censorship. In fact, as soon as he began sharing information about the toxic waste network with the judiciary in 1997, Italy’s domestic intelligence agency classified all investigation findings as top secret, citing national security concerns (Toffa 2013b). Anyone leaking information from public sources risked prison sentences ranging from four to twenty-five years (Toffa 2013b). Early efforts to expose the toxic waste ring, led by the environmental NGO Legambiente (2003), initially received little attention from the national media. It was not until 2013, when a newly appointed government declassified key information, that the Italian media began to openly report on the crisis and the controversial role played by the secret services in covering it up (Toffa 2013b).
By late 2013, this narrative had spread beyond investigative journalism to infiltrate satire-news shows and the wider Italian mediascape, becoming a topic of everyday conversation in Naples and beyond. The former Camorra boss was recast as a repentant whistleblower, bravely revealing vital truths about the dangers threatening the Neapolitan community. In contrast, the state was portrayed as a Machiavellian power, willing to sacrifice public health to protect ruthless criminals and indifferent capitalist lobbies. This portrayal sparked widespread outrage among Neapolitans, who viewed the government’s secretive handling of Camorra-controlled toxic waste disposal as a grave form of institutional violence.
It was against this charged backdrop that the November 2013 protest took place. I was invited to attend by Carlo, a Neapolitan graduate student who worked for a digital radio station and a former anti-Camorra NGO with which I had collaborated during my fieldwork research.3 Carlo’s enthusiasm for the anti-Camorra protest was a clear sign that times had changed since the 1960s, when Italian civil society largely ignored Sciascia’s efforts to expose collusions between organized crime and public authorities (Schneider and Schneider 2003). This shift was especially evident in Naples, a city already familiar with media exposés revealing illicit ties between public institutions and criminal networks. In 2006, for example, Neapolitan politics were shaken by the international success of “Gomorrah,” a bestselling account of the post-1990s Camorra’s violent transformation into a fast-capitalist powerhouse by investigative journalist Roberto Saviano. Yet public opposition to organized crime often remained confined to the upper levels of Southern Italian society, as criminal groups continued to underpin the political economy of the local poor (Schneider and Schneider 2003: 189).
That, however, was not the case when I joined the protest on 16 November 2013. I met Carlo and the other demonstrators at Naples’ main train station, and together we marched toward Piazza Plebiscito, a grand square frequently used by the local municipality for public gatherings. Representatives from the many grassroots networks behind the rally took the stage throughout the evening, delivering passionate speeches that denounced the Camorra’s collusion with local and national public institutions. The protest drew a diverse crowd of locals, each voicing their own demands. Yet despite their varied backgrounds, all the groups introduced themselves on stage as part of a unified political body, bound together by a shared fury against Camorra-mediated expressions of state power in a distinctly populist manner.
At the protest, upper-middle-class volunteers from environmentalist NGOs marched shoulder to shoulder with lower-class residents of the urban outskirts, people whose lives were directly threatened by the carcinogenic effects of the toxic waste. Many wore imaginative costumes resembling the protective suits of nuclear plant workers, a powerful symbol of the invisible dangers they faced. Nearby, local Catholic dioceses marched under the guidance of preti coraggio (“priests of bravery”), clergy known throughout Italy for their courageous stand against organized crime violence. The priests were followed by hundreds of worshippers singing psalms, their voices accompanied by the strumming of Spanish guitars.
Meanwhile, impassioned crowds of left-wing students, precarious workers, and African migrants led smaller sections of the protest from atop colorful mini-trucks. Their vehicles were decked out with vibrant banners and slogans accusing a range of institutions, including the neoliberal government, the secret services, the national media, and the capitalist lobbies supposedly backing them all, of colluding with the Camorra. Loudspeakers mounted on the trucks blasted a mix of socialist anthems, popular TV theme songs, and neomelodic pop-folk tunes.
At the opposite end of the rally, lower-class groups of far-right supporters marched under the lead of local far-right leaders. They fused protectionist rhetoric that condemned “foreign” corporations for shipping toxic waste into their “native land” with ultra-nationalist (if not ultra-regionalist) claims about the supposed “superiority of the Southern Italian race” over the barbaric North of Europe. While marching over Naples, these far-right protesters punctuated their demands with controversial anthems from the Fascist era, aggressive stadium chants, and additional neomelodic songs.
In the end, the disparate factions that had converged for the anti-Camorra protest agreed on only two things: a deep, simmering rage toward state power (especially a state power perceived as colluding with both organized crime and capitalist corporations) and the urgent need for a publicly funded cleanup of the areas poisoned by the radioactive waste network. Beyond that, divisions quickly surfaced. As I learned through interviews conducted during the rally, most far-right and Catholic participants insisted that the reclamation work had to be awarded exclusively to Neapolitan companies, framing it as a “rightful compensation to local workers from the guilty state.” By contrast, leftist protesters and NGO activists argued that only international firms should take on the task, warning that “the only local businesses with the resources to do it are backed by Camorra capital.”
In this latest group of activists’ view, the recent wave of media exposés had made illegal dumping riskier, pushing the Camorra to “go green” to profit from the lucrative new soil reclamation market. From this perspective, the conservative camp’s protectionist demands hinted at something far more troubling: the potentiality that the Camorra itself might have infiltrated the protest, quietly steering its agenda toward its economic gain. Of course, I have no means to confirm or disprove whether the Camorra was genuinely involved in the anti-Camorra protest. However, the fact that local activists expressed legitimate suspicions about this possibility is a significant index of the perceived ability of local organized crime to mediate local political imaginaries.
The national media did not report any criminal infiltration in the protest. Nevertheless, they gave it extensive coverage. During the rally, the historical center of Naples was swarmed by national TV crews. The protesters interacted with them as if they were tourist attractions, asking the most famous TV journalists for handshakes, autographs, and “selfies” to share online. Alongside national TV crews, I noticed several media operators working for local TV networks. As Carlo quickly pointed out to me, most of these outlets were owned or indirectly managed by Camorra affiliates. To my surprise, the operators of these supposedly Camorra-managed media acted as passionate supporters of the protesters’ cause. They expressed the solidarity of their extralegal patrons and sponsors with the victims of the toxic waste ring, populistically referring to them on camera as “our beloved audience” and “the most authentic people of Naples.”
These local media operators also distributed free food and beverages to protesters of any ideological stripe, keeping them entertained with music performances by notoriously Camorra-sponsored neomelodic singers. When I interviewed some of them, they unanimously stated that the Neapolitan soil “needed to be cleaned up soon, and by Neapolitan companies only.” As such, they indirectly supported the suspicions of my earlier informants, who believed that the anti-Camorra protest (and perhaps even the media exposé that inspired it) had been partially influenced by local organized crime aiming to find new means of profiting from its ongoing involvement in the Neapolitan and national public sphere.
The November 2013 anti-Camorra protest offered a vivid glimpse into how subaltern politics in Naples intertwine with the forms of publicity fostered by both the Italian state and the Camorra. The dynamic was striking: while the Italian government initially kept the Camorra’s ecological crimes out of the national media, it was a former Camorra boss who later brought these very crimes to light through those same media channels. Equally telling is how local protestors, drawn from diverse and often opposing social backgrounds and ideological camps, expressed their outrage and demands through remarkably similar media references.
For example, right-wing and left-wing protesters turned to the same media-inspired imaginaries to make their anger heard. TV show themes, soccer chants, even Camorra-style neomelodic songs were pulled into the march, reworked as symbols of belonging to a local, defiant idea of “the people.” These were not just performances. They were tools, flexible enough to cross ideological lines, and aimed squarely at mobilizing against a state seen as complicit in violent crimes.
Yet alongside the chants and music came pragmatic bargaining: calls for public funds, arguments over who should get the contracts for cleanup work. This way, the language employed by the protesters was implicitly inspired by neoliberal forms of civic participation, reflecting not a shared class struggle, but the fact that everyone there was part of the same media audiences—media consumers that had recently watched the toxic waste scandal explode on TV. In the thick of it, camera crews from public broadcasters worked the same crowd as teams from Camorra-linked media outlets, their interactions with protesters collapsing the usual boundaries between legal and illegal media power, between enemy camps that, for that day, paradoxically (and perhaps even hypocritically) marched side by side.
Taken together, the forms of subaltern publicity that emerged during the November 2013 rally bound the interests of the state and the Camorra into a joint hold over the public sphere, operating through both neoliberal logics and populist performances. In this process, they drew diverse subaltern groups into shared modes of “collective self-abstraction” (Cody 2015: 61), positioning them against both legal and illegal institutions while simultaneously pulling them into consumer-driven interactions with national and local media outlets that were controlled by those same institutions. These political practices indeed could “not exist independently from their mediatic representation” (Cody 2015: 62), making the Neapolitan public sphere as a contested stage where licit and illicit power, violence, and resistance constantly collide.
As the previous ethnographic vignette illustrates, the ways in which media texts are produced and circulated (along with the extent to which audiences can participate in that circulation) are central to the workings of today’s Italian public sphere. Nowhere is this more evident than in Naples for at least two key reasons. First, the “regimes of media representation” (Hall 1997) promoted by the Italian state-regulated cultural industries since the nineteenth century have been instrumental in constructing the so-called “Southern Question,” the enduring discourse on the historical socio-economic divide between Italy’s Southern and Northern regions (Gramsci 2006 [1930]; Schneider 1998). Second, since at least the 1990s, Neapolitan organized crime has become deeply enmeshed with local media politics through its substantial investments in local media production and distribution (Ravveduto 2007, 2023; De Pascale 2012).
Tracing the processes of capitalist “modernization” that led to the political unification of Italy, Gramsci (2006 [1930]) argued that the national bourgeoisie reduced the Southern regions of the country into an internal “exploitable colony” (2), through the compliance of the state and the dynamics of cultural production it fostered since the late nineteenth century (3). This dynamic, which Gramsci famously described as the “Southern Question,” was rooted in the historical fact that Southern Italy was denied a genuine democratic role in the nation-building process and thus remained marginalized in the very formation of Italian unification. Previously governed by the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the region was militarily invaded in 1861 by the Northern Italian Kingdom of Piedmont, which then rebranded itself as the Kingdom (and, after the Second World War, the Republic) of Italy (Clark 2002: 82).
Since then, the Italian central state has prioritized the interests of the Northern Italian bourgeoisie, who historically backed the invasion of the South, by unevenly allocating public investments in the country’s economic fabric (Gramsci 2006 [1926]). The Kingdom of Italy provided its Northern regions with industrial infrastructures, advanced technologies, and public apparatuses, largely excluding the South from such developmental policies (Clark 2002: 88). In short, the post-unification Italian state transformed Southern Italy into a low-cost reservoir of raw materials and cheap labor, mirroring dynamics exercised by other European powers over their former colonies (Gramsci 2006 [1926]; Clark 2002: 90; Schneider 1998).
Beyond worsening the living conditions of the Southern Italian lower classes, this situation had profound effects on both local and global demographics. According to the data collected by the CISEI (International Center for the Study of Italian Emigration), Southern Italians composed most of the 26.5 million individuals taking part in the Italian Diaspora to the Americas, Oceania, and Northern Europe between 1876 and 1985 (CISEI 2012). Additionally, 5.5 million Southerners migrated to Northern Italy from 1965 to 2010 alone, often encountering persistent unemployment and social marginalization in their new communities (Dan and Fornasin 2013). Indeed, 46 percent of Southern Italians still lived near the poverty line in 2018, compared to 17 percent of Northern Italians (ISTAT 2018: 48).
The subaltern conditions historically experienced by the Southern Italian poor were not solely rooted in military violence and economic exploitation. They were also reified by the dissemination of essentializing, if not openly racializing, discourses by the national “civil society”:4 a state-funded middle class of bureaucrats, cultural producers, and media operators (Gramsci 2006 [1926]: 13). These discourses, which were grounded in internal “colonialism, free trade, and nationalist ideology” (9), legitimized the central state’s predatory reforms of the Southern Italian political economy, describing the Southern Italian masses as intrinsically incapable of participating in so-called “modernity” due to their “passionate, undisciplined, [and] rebellious” cultural approach to the public sphere (Schneider 1998: 1).
Integrated into the workings of public institutions, including those overseeing the national media industries, the post-unification Italian civil society has historically acted as a gatekeeper, mediating the Southern Italian poor’s access to the public sphere, as well as any “official” sources of information through which they might interpret their social positionalities within the national landscape (Schneider 1998: 19). The much-invoked “backwardness” of Southern Italy, when compared with continental Europe, is therefore not the result of archaic economic structures or the “amoral familism” that Banfield (1958) famously claimed set the cultural values of local organized crime against the “civilizing” logic of modern state power. Rather, it was produced by the Italian state itself, working in concert with Northern Italian capitalist powerhouses and Southern social elites intent on safeguarding their former privileged status within the new order (Gramsci 2006 [1926]: 3).
This state of things compromised the living standards of the Southern Italian lower classes, fostering profound socio-cultural divisions within the national population. After 1861, Italy was not culturally homogeneous, as it consisted of communities that had historically experienced different forms of governance, economic systems, and even languages5 (Steward-Steinberg 2007: 3). Aiming to promote cultural and linguistic standardization among Italians, the post-unification state addressed this challenge through educational reforms like the so-called “Coppino Law,” which introduced universal elementary education in 1877 (Steward-Steinberg 2007: 313). Through this reform, the central state sought to assimilate the Southern poor into the Northern cultural mainstream while disseminating narratives that equated the “literate” (those able to access the public sphere through state-regulated education) with the hegemonic, and the “illiterate” (those lacking formal education) with the subaltern. However, the chronic lack of public infrastructures (including school buildings) in nineteenth-century Southern Italy meant that such reforms functioned primarily as tools of further social marginalization, excluding the local poor from most state-mediated process of upward mobility (Steward-Steinberg 2007: 118).
This was the case until the 1920s, when the Fascist regime addressed the Southern Question with more inclusive administrative strategies, which instrumentally replaced the crypto-colonial narratives justifying the North–South divide with new racializing rhetorics supporting Italy’s late colonial expansion in Africa (Pandolfi 1998: 278). The Fascist state expanded the presence of public infrastructures in Southern Italy (Bonini 2004: 95). At the same time, it established a technologically advanced national media industry, which the Fascist Party tightly controlled, imposing a totalitarian monopoly over public communication through violent means (Zagarrio 2007). Through the dissemination of populist propaganda, particularly via state-funded radio and film broadcasts, the Fascist media industries enabled many Southerners to engage with the public sphere on a sensory level for the first time in history (Giusto 2011). As a result, national media became the most widespread platform through which the Southern poor could participate in national discourses, embedding the state as a constant presence in their lives, memories, and political imaginaries (Giusto 2011: 302).
Far from being a Fascist feature only, the role played by the Italian media industries in state–citizen relations did not disappear after the Second World War. Since 1947, the newborn Italian Republic continued to manage national media outlets via dynamics of public monopoly, which were not dissimilar from those implemented by the previous regime (Zagarrio 2007: 121). In 1954, for example, the Italian Parliament rebranded the former Fascist apparatus of radio broadcasting, the so-called URI (Italian Radiophonic Union), into the RAI (Italian Radio and Television), a public holding in charge of managing, inter alia, national TV broadcasts (Gnagnarella 2010: 62).
The Republic introduced television as a public infrastructure intended to “modernize” the country by “re-educating” the Italian poor into an “imagined community” with a mildly nationalist orientation (Fanchi 2002; Anderson 1984). This project once again hinged on the envisioned transformation of the Southern lower classes into literate participants in the state-regulated cultural mainstream (Fanchi 2002: 69). In doing so, early Italian television reinforced the North–South divide at the heart of national discourse, underscoring the South’s cultural inadequacy versus the North (Pandolfi 1998: 288).
In the 1960s, for example, a popular public TV show titled “It’s Never Too Late: Course of Working-Class Education for the Rehabilitation of the Illiterate Adult”6 aired elementary school lessons during prime time (Bindi 2005: 142). The overpaternalistic tone of the teacher/anchorman and the frequent appearance of Southern peasants in traditional costumes among the students/performers participating in the show reinforced essentialist portrayals of the Southern Italian masses. This type of “service television” thus promoted forms of cultural and linguistic standardization, which depicted the “illiterate” Southerner as a defective socio-political entity in need of being “rehabilitated” through the processes of subaltern publicity made available by their access to public media (Bindi 2005: 144).
Since then, the Italian national media industries have remained key instruments of political mediation between the state and its audiences, including the Southern Italian poor. As exemplified by the state-managed media coverage of the 2013 Neapolitan radioactive waste scandal, this is largely because the so-called “educational” content broadcast by public media often reflected the priorities of the capitalist classes supporting the state’s agenda. The lasting mediating role of Italian media was also ensured by the institutional frameworks that historically governed their functioning. As I will further discuss in Chapter 3, the Italian Parliament directly oversaw the management of RAI until the late 1980s. This positioned Italian television as a quasi-democratic form of public monopoly, since the Parliament was composed of representatives from the party system through which citizens could also engage in institutional politics, whether by voting or through collective demonstrations.
This trend was further reshaped after the end of the Cold War, following a series of neoliberal reforms implemented by Presidente del Consiglio (Prime Minister) and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi and his institutional successors. Neoliberal reforms of the national labor market led to widespread precarization of working conditions (Molè 2011), partially extending the marginalizing media discourses that had historically affected the Southern Italian poor to the growing Northern Italian precariat (Dematteo 2007). Meanwhile, neoliberal reforms of the national media, especially in the realm of television and digital media, introduced new controversial ways of engaging with the public sphere for Italian “citizens/spectators,” which had a particularly significant impact on the South of the country due to the ongoing outcomes of the Southern Question (Panarari 2011; Viroli 2012).
As I will show in greater detail in Chapters 3 and 6, these new modalities of civic engagement have often been populist and exploitative in nature, ultimately deepening the socio-economic divide between hegemonic and subaltern subjects in contemporary Italy, and the South more specifically (Molè 2013). In some cases, especially those grounded in digital media practices, such modalities have also helped generate new market-driven configurations of power between Italian institutions and the transnational corporations that own the digital platforms through which political communication increasingly takes place (D’Arma 2016). Despite the increasingly populist tones through which online media platforms address their publics, Italian state power now often finds itself in a condition of political subalternity vis-à-vis these corporations, operating within market-driven mechanisms of digital cultural production over which it possesses very limited coercive authority (Couldry and Mejias 2019).
As the former capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Naples played a central role in the historical processes discussed so far. Until the late nineteenth century, the city was a major European metropolis thanks to its strategic location on Mediterranean trade routes, its large population, and its early embrace of a publicly funded industrial economy (Lancaster 2019). Naples was the main seat of power over the Southern Italian countryside, where its elites governed through a largely feudal system of aristocratic privilege (Barbagallo 1980: 16). However, after 1861, a series of predatory reforms imposed by the post-unification Italian state upended these dynamics. For example, the forced relocation of most industrial facilities to Northern Italy and the confiscation of the Neapolitan public bank’s treasury by the newly created Bank of Italy plunged Naples into a prolonged crisis, leaving the local job market unable to meet the demands of the city’s population (Snowden 1995: 21).
The rapid shift of Naples’ former workforce into a large population of unemployed people led to the local lower classes becoming increasingly disconnected from the national public sphere. Combined with the lasting effects of feudal governance from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, this situation fostered widespread clientelist attitudes toward public affairs among them. In turn, this helped shape the essentialist stereotypes about the Neapolitan poor that have circulated in national media and political narratives ever since. For the past two centuries, Italian national media have portrayed the inhabitants of the Neapolitan social peripheries as the very symbol of the “backwardness” often used to describe the Italian South as a whole in social and cultural terms (Gibson 1998; Pandolfi 1998: 286). Similarly, Neapolitan civil society and the local upper-class intelligentsia quickly embraced these orientalist views within the local cultural industries. As I will explore in Chapter 1, for example, early twentieth-century Neapolitan theatre, literature, and music often portrayed the local poor as naturally rebellious, corrupt, or even criminal. This elitist perspective toward Naples’ unemployed masses indirectly helped fuel the rise and cultural acceptance of local organized crime, both as an informal political power and as a significant cultural force.
The Neapolitan Camorra itself did not become a stable force until the late nineteenth century, concurrently with the political unification of the Italian peninsula (Allum 2006). During this troubled time, a severe economic crisis hit the Neapolitan hinterland, strengthening the local smuggling industry, which provided the poor with affordable goods and job opportunities (Barbagallo 2011: 5). Within this context, powerful groups of smugglers and racketeers known as guappi organized illegal systems of wealth redistribution, stepping in to fill the gap left by the new Italian public administrations (Barbagallo 2011: 8). Operating as urban street gangs, the guappi of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries violently imposed protection fees on most local businesses and public offices, partly redistributing their profits by offering socio-economic services to the dispossessed inhabitants of the Neapolitan slums, including financial loans, coverage for legal and healthcare costs, and even draconian forms of extralegal justice provision (Marmo 2012; Barbagallo 2011: 45).
After the Second World War, the presence of “North American Mafiosi among the American soldiers occupying the city” provided guappi gangs with an unprecedented flux of essential goods to smuggle into the local black market (Allum 2011: 326). Amid the hardships of postwar economy, Neapolitan smuggling evolved into a “full-scale business, culturally influenced in both ‘gangsterist’ and ‘capitalist’ terms” by the Italian-American Cosa Nostra (Allum 2006: 44). This led the guappi to handle more money than their traditional activities allowed them to reinvest and expand their economic interventions into other criminal enterprises, including those managing sex-working, gambling, and drug trafficking, increasingly laundering their illicit profits through the acquisition of state-regulated private companies inside and outside of the Neapolitan urban space (Marmo 2012).
This transformation enabled the guappi to restructure their former “family businesses” into independent clan di Camorra (Camorra gangs) operating under similar principles of criminal governance. Since then, the Neapolitan Camorra has functioned as a loosely connected alliance of clans that serve as violent “reference points in the local communities, providing jobs, assistance, and protection” to the city’s subaltern masses (Allum 2008: 349). It did so through partial redistribution of wealth, which Neapolitan mobsters exploited via violent interferences in the state-regulated economy and, perhaps more critically, institutional politics. Starting in the 1950s, the Camorra infiltrated most local public offices by mobilizing lower-class voters in support of selected electoral candidates, who were in turn expected to divert public funds into various Camorra-backed economic ventures (Allum 2006: 26–27).
These dynamics underwent further processes of so-called capitalist modernization from the 1980s onward. Following the earthquake that hit the Southern Italian region of Irpinia in 1980, for instance, the Camorra almost entirely monopolized the management of public funds allocated for reconstruction (Saviano 2006: 126). A significant portion of these resources was reinvested to deepen the criminal organization’s entrenchment within national politics and global finance (Allum 2011: 326). This resulted in an unprecedented “explosion of organized crime gangs and activities” in Naples, sparking a series of violent wars between competing clans for control of the local underworld up to the 2000s (Saviano 2006).
Rather than undermining the clans’ criminal authority among the Neapolitan poor, these wars dramatically reshaped the Camorra’s previous approach to wealth redistribution and the provision of social services to its urban clientele, making it increasingly protectionist. Pressured by the need to recruit ever-growing numbers of affiliates to outmatch their rivals, the clans have, since the 1990s, restricted such services only to affiliated members (Allum 2006: 78). As such, the Camorra’s demography expanded at an unprecedented scale, effectively transforming itself into a System of power. In 1982, only about 12 clans operated in Naples (Commissione Antimafia 1993: 2). By 2007, Naples counted at least 237 Camorra clans, affiliating more than 8,000 professional gangsters, along with their extended families (Iannuzzo 2006: 14).
Unlike old guappi gangs, the contemporary Camorra cannot be simply described as a “criminal industry of private protection” focused on exercising extralegal territorial control over local urban areas (Gambetta 1992). Due to the clans’ key role in mediating between private and public agencies, as well as between legal and illegal enterprises involved in global trafficking that range from drugs and waste disposal to arms, food, textiles, real estates, unregistered labor, electoral votes, and media content, the Neapolitan organized crime network can be better described as a powerful politico-economic broker simultaneously intersecting local, national, and even transnational instantiations of the public sphere (Allum 2018).
Significantly, the Neapolitan clans recognized the crucial role of mass media in Italian politics and the advantages they could gain by investing in the local mediascape from the mid-1980s (Lamberti 1985). During my ethnographic fieldwork research, for instance, every Camorra clan I encountered, or even just heard about, directly or indirectly controlled at least one (analog or digital) local television network, radio station, or music production house. Through their involvement in local media, the clans spread populist narratives that strategically link the social identity of the Neapolitan poor with that of local mobsters in opposition to state power. At the same time, these narratives mirror the essentialist portrayals of the Neapolitan poor found in the state-regulated media landscape. By doing so, the clans also build patronage networks with their audiences, offering lucrative career opportunities within Camorra-run media productions in exchange for substantial bribes (De Pascale 2012; Ravveduto 2007: 12).
In short, the Camorra-led media industries of Naples mediate forms of political interplay between the organization’s affiliates and the Neapolitan poor, which parallel those historically fostered by Italian state-regulated media industries amid the Italian citizenry. As such, rising tensions between local and national conditions of subaltern publicity became central to the Neapolitan lower-class experience, while constituting important ethnographic platforms for interpreting the populist approach to politics permeating the contemporary Italian social peripheries, as well as current neoliberal democracies at large.
To answer the questions at the heart of this book, I spent time in Neapolitan neighborhoods characterized by long-standing poverty and the insistent presence of Camorra-backed media, neomelodic songs playing from shopfronts, local TV shows flickering in living rooms, and digital traces on websites and social media profiles, alongside the parallel stream of state-regulated media. Over roughly ten years, I returned to the city for multiple periods of fieldwork, gradually piecing together this layered media landscape.
Two periods of fieldwork were especially important for this book. The first took place between September 2013 and December 2014, when I gathered insights into the workings of Camorra-backed and state-regulated Neapolitan analog media industries, and the forms of political mediation they fostered among the local poor. The second unfolded between May and November 2024, focusing on their digital counterparts. This later research was preceded by six months of netnography (Kozinets 2015), from December 2023 to April 2024, during which I followed and engaged with the online presence of Camorra-backed and state-regulated Neapolitan websites and social media profiles.
Most of my ethnography took place in three of Naples’ many rioni—a local term for socially marginalized neighborhoods: Montesanto, Quartieri Spagnoli, and Poggioreale. I chose these areas for three main reasons. First, police reports and numerous journalistic accounts identified them as places where the producers, performers, and audiences of Camorra-backed media live, work, and network with each other (Di Meo 2012; Corriere della Sera 2012).
Second, for roughly three decades before my fieldwork research, the underworld politics of these neighborhoods had remained relatively stable (Allum 2006; Barbagallo 2011), unlike other rioni in Naples that have been caught up in recurrent Camorra wars since the mid-1990s (Liguori 2017; Ruotolo 2013). I hypothesized that the lasting stability of the criminal landscape in these neighborhoods would ease my research, offering both a measure of personal safety and the chance to develop a deeper, long-term understanding of local subaltern politics. Third, these rioni are among the most densely populated areas in Europe (Iuliano 2016; Comune di Napoli 2018). For example, a recent census showed that eighty-one thousand people live in Montesanto alone, packed into just six square kilometers (Comune di Napoli 2018). Drawing on Ravveduto (2007) and Dines (2012), I believe that this proximity of gangsters, media makers, and subaltern publics could encourage their entanglement in shared mediation dynamics.
To gather my data, I used a mix of ethnographic research methods, including participant observation of how Neapolitans produce and consume media, alongside semi-structured interviews with those involved in the local mediascape as performers, sponsors, media operators, and audiences. As I noted earlier, the Camorra has played a key role in creating and circulating pop-folk music, local television, and digital media over the past thirty years. My ethnography, therefore, unfolded in three phases, each centered on one of these cultural forms.
The first phase of my research focused on participant observation within Naples’ pop-folk music scene. During this time, I identified and connected with key informants who are active in the local neomelodic world, including singers, composers, musicians, and their fans. I reached out to these people through personal contacts, starting with phone calls, word of mouth, and their social media profiles. As I will explore in Chapter 1, this direct, relational approach was made possible by the professional culture among neomelodic local celebrities, which emphasizes close social ties, informal exchanges of favors, and clientelist networking.
After gaining informed consent from these media operators, I regularly accompanied them to recording studios where they created their music, as well as private and public gatherings where they mingled with fans, patrons, and clients. I also attended most of their live shows. This close involvement drew me into their professional and personal lives, spending leisure time with them and helping them out as a “neomelodic” assistant. This friendly, up-close access gave me a chance to see firsthand how they produce, perform, and share their music while engaging their audiences through Camorra-mediated relationships.
At the same time, observing the neomelodic scene helped me connect with other people involved in the industry: workers like managers, authors, video-makers, bodyguards, and paparazzi, sponsors such as gangsters and moneylenders, and professional connoisseurs like journalists, music critics, bloggers, and fan club organizers. As I built further personal relationships with these people, I conducted ethnographies of their everyday lives to understand how they interpreted Camorra-mediated subaltern politics. This first phase of research directly informed Chapters 1 and 2 of this book.
During the second phase of my ethnography, I immersed myself in the cultural production of Camorra-sponsored local TV networks, contrasting their workings with those of Italy’s national public broadcasters. Through the connections I had formerly made with neomelodic music celebrities, I was invited to volunteer at Canale Sole (Sun Channel), a Camorra-sponsored local television station, where I took on roles as a comedian and anchor. This experience gave me an insider’s view into the dynamics of mediation and the shaping of public visibility within Neapolitan television industries, especially as they played out among local subaltern publics.
To make firsthand, informed comparisons between Camorra-backed TV networks and Italy’s mainstream television, I combined the data I gathered at Canale Sole with ethnographic observations from technical staff and performers working in national public television during field visits to their offices in Rome. I focused closely on how these state-regulated media producers related to their sponsors, employers, and audiences, patterns of connection that often closely mirrored those I had witnessed among Neapolitan local TV operators and their extralegal patrons. This second phase of my research directly informed Chapters 3 and 5 of this book.
The third phase of my research unfolded through many short field trips to Naples between 2016 and 2018, combined with ongoing netnographic work on digital media platforms and an extended in-person ethnography from May 2023 to January 2024. These efforts allowed me to identify, observe, and engage with Camorra-backed digital practices of cultural production and social media networking. Immersing myself in these digital dynamics, I examined their populist and neoliberal roots. At the same time, I compared them to similar processes promoted by state-regulated socio-political agencies among lower-class Neapolitan Internet users via the same online tools of mediation.
During this third phase, I engaged online with the digital spaces and social media profiles run by Camorra-backed cultural operators, including active neomelodic celebrities, influencers, bloggers, and internet trolls, while critically comparing them to those managed by local institutions and civil society actors like NGO members, journalists, political leaders, activists, and elected officials. Later, I met these informants in Naples to interview them and directly participate in the offline mediation processes sparked by their online presence, as these influenced the social and political lives of their Neapolitan “followers.”
Building on my earlier ethnographies of Naples’ analog media landscape and extending them into the rapidly expanding local digital media scene, this latest phase of research enabled me to explore the unfolding, long-term dynamics of neoliberal and populist processes fostering subaltern publicity in the Neapolitan public sphere. It also allowed me to trace how these processes adapt to shifting communication technologies and ongoing social and cultural change. This third phase directly informed Chapter 6 and the Conclusion of this book.
Beyond the methods I used to gather data, my research constantly faced ethical challenges, which I navigated through careful approaches to ethnographic representation. Above all, my work often involved recounting the criminal actions of individuals who could face legal repercussions (or worse!) if their connections to the Camorra were exposed. To protect my informants, I have omitted any details that might allow the readers of this book to identify them. However, some people in my research are public figures (e.g., singers, TV personalities, digital influencers, political activists), whose visibility made simple pseudonyms insufficient to safeguard their privacy and my own safety. For this reason, I reframed most narratives of “real-life” ethnographic events, carefully altering timelines, locations, and character details to create composite vignettes. This strategy prevents readers from piecing together exact events while preserving the socio-cultural truth of the stories I tell.
This approach to ethnographic representation is not intended to compromise the accuracy of my data. As Crapanzano (1992) reminds us, any ethnography is, to some extent, a partial work of fiction, aiming to “translate” lived experiences into abstract theories informed by subjective interpretation (68). Similarly, Fassin (2014) highlights that any “ethnographic imagination implies the power to make sense of the world that subjects create by relating to larger cultural structures” (52). It is these larger structures, not the isolated events, that form the true focus of socio-cultural anthropology (52). The composite nature of my ethnography, then, faithfully captures the neoliberal and populist dynamics of subaltern publicity emerging from Naples’ media industries, while protecting those who live within them (ethnographers included!) from further harm in their already vulnerable circumstances.
Another key ethical challenge informing this book was balancing my need to develop tools to confront the deep-rooted presence of criminal violence in Southern Italy and beyond with the responsibility to represent organized crime violence anthropologically, through cultural relativism. This meant striving to understand the perspectives of individuals who do not necessarily share my firm condemnation of organized crime violence. To navigate this tension between ethics and professional duty, my ethnography seeks to portray underworld media politics as emically as possible. Starting with the next chapter, my analysis of the Camorra-led mediascape will be interwoven with the direct voices of my informants, whose views may differ a great deal from my own. The ongoing tensions in my encounters with Camorra-friendly voices thus become a reflective lens, inviting readers to engage with their interpretations of Neapolitan organized crime and actively participate in the “cultural negotiations” that continually shape and reshape the ultimate meanings of Neapolitan media (Geertz 1973).
Inspired by Sciascia’s anti-sensationalistic approach to portraying organized crime politics, this book also carries an ironic undertone—both in its depiction of the Camorra-sponsored cultural production scene and in acknowledging the unavoidable ethnographic “collusions” that emerged from my interactions with Neapolitan gangsters. This irony, on one hand, allowed me to approach organized crime through culturally relativistic lenses. As Valverde (2002) observes, “a certain ironic self-deprecation” toward “ivory-towered” academic portrayals of crime helps social scientists recognize that ethical and political choices cannot be drawn from absolute truths but only from the analysis of ethically situated life experiences (86).
On the other hand, these ironic tones serve as a form of resistance against the discursive power wielded by the Camorra, drawing on the subtle “subversive effects” that irony can produce (Hutcheon 1994: 12). One of the most dangerous aspects of Camorra-mediated cultural productions is their ability to present totalizing images of the control organized crime holds supposedly over the everyday lives of Neapolitans. For this reason, several anti-Camorra activists, including Carlo, urged me to portray the Camorra through an ironic lens, enabling the circulation of counter-hegemonic, yet ethnographically grounded, representations. I accepted this challenge as an extension of my participant observation, especially since this book itself is a cultural production that emerged, at least in part, from the Neapolitan media industries, where, in a somewhat subversive role, I also played the part of a local television comedian.
As explained earlier, I built my ethnography of the Neapolitan media industries around three key sites of participant observation. The first phase delved into the Camorra-sponsored neomelodic music scene. In the second, I explored the political life of Camorra-run local television networks, comparing those findings with insights from state-regulated Italian television. The third phase focused on Camorra-driven digital mediation over time, contrasting it with the online cultural production and social media activities of contemporary Italian state-regulated socio-political agencies. Reflecting this multi-sited approach, the book itself is structured into three distinct but deeply interconnected parts.
The first part of this book (Chapters 1 and 2) unpacks the social, cultural, and political dynamics involved in the circulation of Camorra-sponsored neomelodic music productions among Naples’ poor communities. The second part (Chapters 3 and 5) turns to parallel developments within the local Camorra-backed television scene, exploring their intersections with state-regulated media politics. The third part (Chapter 6 and the Conclusion) draws on data gathered both online and offline through my long-term ethnographic engagement with Camorra-backed and state-regulated digital mediation processes. Together, these three parts offer a comprehensive view of the diverse forms of cultural production and subaltern publicity that have emerged from the Neapolitan media industries over the last three decades, alongside their intertwined neoliberal and populist socio-political implications.
More specifically, Chapter 1 explores how the System of cultural production and marketing within the neomelodic music industry helps circulate Camorra-mediated populist and neoliberal discourses, which contribute to inform the political life of Naples’ social peripheries. The chapter will show how the neomelodic industry reinforces the Camorra’s role as a local mediator of politics, culture, and aesthetics, fostering populist dynamics of subaltern publicity and social identity formation among its sponsors, performers, and audiences.
Chapter 2 examines the Neapolitan neomelodic live concert scene as a Camorra-mediated performative stage where different subaltern publics actively engage in populist social representation through highly financialized, neoliberal forms of asymmetric reciprocity. The chapter will reveal how these concerts offer the Neapolitan subaltern a chance to participate directly in Camorra-backed aesthetics, imaginaries, and power dynamics, deeply influencing their political lives in relation to state authority. In doing so, these events foster branded political relationships, self-exploitative patronage systems, and potential paths for socio-economic mobility that involve performers, their Camorra patrons, clients, and the wider public sphere, while also reinforcing organized crime’s violent hold on local conditions of cultural hegemony.
Drawing on my participant observation at Canale Sole, Chapter 3 explores the political roles of Camorra-sponsored and state-regulated television in contemporary Italy. It situates the cultural production practices and openly populist imaginaries of Camorra-sponsored local TV outlets within the broader context of the mid-1990s neoliberal reforms of Italy’s state-regulated national media industries. The chapter shows how the neoliberal Italian state’s efforts to exclude former social-democratic instantiations of civil society from television management profoundly intersected Neapolitan subaltern politics. This shift introduced top-down, state-monitored forms of direct participation by the lower classes in producing and circulating television content. These processes paved the way for the populist political mobilization and mass publicity that continue to influence Italian institutional politics today. At the same time, they reproduced the “mediacratic” traits of Italian neoliberal populism within various extralegal agencies of cultural production operating on the local level, including those controlled by apparent “public enemies” like the Neapolitan Camorra.
Chapter 4 serves as a visual “Intermezzo”: a reflective, sensory pause within the text. It presents a gallery of ethnographic photographs I captured and annotated during my fieldwork, aimed at visually bringing to life the socio-cultural mediations explored in the other chapters of the book. These images not only document evocative moments from my research but also capture the atmosphere, gestures, and everyday relationships that weave together apparently disconnected local dynamics, offering readers an added layer of emotional and situated insight.
Building on the insights from Chapter 3, Chapter 5 delves into the politico-economic landscape of Naples’ extralegal television industries, depicting local TV networks as Camorra-mediated neoliberal markets catering to the urban poor. As I will show, the Neapolitan televisual scene depends heavily on Camorra-controlled exchanges of money, labor, and social visibility, turning local populist forms of subaltern publicity into a dynamic space where personal mobility and exploitation intertwine. Moreover, these Camorra-run outlets promote individualistic ideas of selfhood and intense capitalist competition among the local poor, further tightening organized crime’s grip on the neoliberal political economy of contemporary Naples.
Chapter 6 takes the insights from previous chapters about Naples’ Camorra-backed and state-run analog media industries and brings them into the digital age. Through my online ethnography and in-person interviews with Camorra-supported digital creators, social media managers and content producers linked to today’s explicitly populist Italian political parties, and their respective Neapolitan social media followers, this chapter explores how these cyber-storytellers build relationships and brand themselves online. It shows how their digital work impacts the political imaginaries of local audiences and reframes power relationships between political powerholders and transnational online platform owners, weaving neoliberal and populist ways of participating in politics ever more deeply into the public sphere.
Finally, the Conclusion brings together the contrasting digital media strategies of Camorra-backed and state-regulated actors explored earlier. It examines how both harness neoliberal forms of branded relationality and populist imaginaries, while also highlighting how Neapolitan anti-Camorra NGOs and civil society activists use digital media to resist organized crime violence. Building on this further ethnographic comparison, the Conclusion offers reflections on how the research findings inspiring this book speak to broader populist political imaginaries emerging in many global contexts marked by neoliberal governance and organized crime.