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The Mafia: A Cultural History

The Mafia: A Cultural History

by RobertoM.Dainotto (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2015

    $6.86
Synopsis

What makes Tony Soprano so likeable? Why would we rather leave the cannoli and take the gun? Do we truly want Scarface's Tony Montana to succeed? Is Michael Corleone a misunderstood hero or a despicable villain? Roberto Dainotto traces the complex and fascinating development of the mafia: its rural beginnings in Western Sicily; its growth into what has been aptly described as a global multinational of crime; and its parallel evolution in music, print and on the big screen. The book probes the tension between the real mafia - its brutal and often violent reality - and how we imagine it to be: a mythical assembly of codes of honour, family values and chivalric masochism. Rather than dismissing such mafia stereotypes as untrue, Dainotto sets out to understand what needs and desires, material and psychic longings, are satisfied by our mafia fantasies. Exploring the rich array of films, books, television, music and even video games portraying and inspired by the mafia, this book offers not only a social, economic and political history of the mafia but a new way of understanding our enduring fascination with what lurks behind the sinister omerta of the family business.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 224
 Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 15 Mar 2015
ISBN 10: 1780234430
ISBN 13: 9781780234434

Media Reviews
Dainotto's The Mafia: A Cultural History offers something unique in the somewhat overcrowded category of books about the Mafia and its pop culture representations: a Sicilian intellectual's historically informed yet personal perspective on the enduring appeal of organized crime stories. --PopMatters
Adopting a cultural studies approach to his subject, Dainotto argues for reading the Mafia as a cultural system whose development traces back to the 19th century. He is masterful in extending the discussion beyond a single field, and in his multidisciplinary analysis he connects the Mafia as a worldwide organization with historical origins in Sicily to its literary and cinematic representations in Italy and the US. He explains how theater, television, music, and video games renegotiate the organization, and he highlights how these depictions of the Mafia and its bosses blur the border between fiction and reality. Dainotto's reliance on secondary sources notwithstanding, his unique approach to the Mafia as a cultural system bonding the organization(s) per se (the historical Mafia and now the Neapolitan camorra) to their representations truly engages and challenges the present way of thinking about it. . . . Highly recommended.
--Choice
Fascination with the Mafia is something Dainotto digs into in this enjoyable and informative read. We are drawn to the traditions and history, while frightened by its brutality and ruthlessness. In answering why, Dainotto jumps from Garibaldi to The Godfather, and deconstructs works such as the excellent film Salvatore Giuliano. Dainotto draws a portrait of the Sicilian and Sicilian-American Mafia and its evolution from land-control in south Italy to big business in the United States. And he gives it astute cultural contexts, observing how a Mafia boss was similar to what many desired in the concept of the American dream. But he was also everything they feared. --Irish Times
Author Bio
Born in Sicily, Roberto Dainotto is Professor of Romance Studies and of Literature at Duke University, North Carolina, and author of Europe (in Theory) (2007).