The Siren’s Children: Rethinking Postcolonial Naples

This essay repositions Naples as a postcolonial city through the lens of criminality in two literary texts: Il libro napoletano dei morti (2012) by Francesco Palmieri and L’abusivo (2001) by Antonio Franchini. As a crossroads of global cultural and economic intersections, Naples sits “in a space that extends both from Southern Europe and from North Africa” [Cavallo, Vincenzo, and Iain Chambers. 2014. Neapolitan Nights: From Vesuvian Blues to Planetary Vibes. https://www.academia.edu/5599503/Neapolitan_nights_from_Vesuvian_blues_to_planetary_vibes]. While locating the city geographically, this statement also has an ideological connotation which casts Naples as Europe’s “Other”, the place where an “Arabic exercise of violence” is arbitrarily associated with the “endemic state of lawlessness” typical of colonial and postcolonial societies [Dickie, John. 1998. Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave]. Criminal narratives of the city act as a magnifying lens to expose the hidden connections between the “underworld” and conventional power structures that both disrupt and reinforce the rhetoric of western-centric modernity and state–society relations in Italy. As the protagonist of Il libro napoletano dei morti puts it, a narrativization of Naples’ criminal organization, the Camorra, allows for a “discovery of the city from its forgotten corners” [Palmieri, Francesco. 2012. Il libro napoletano dei morti. Milan: Mondadori.]. By locating the city within the geographical and historical situatedness of the Mediterranean as a land of cultural crossings and intersections [Cassano, Franco. 2012. Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean. New York: Fordham University Press .], this essay investigates the “grey areas” occupied by criminals; it offers a new perspective on the city that goes beyond the accommodational space negotiated between the “oppressor” and the “resister”. The case of postcolonial Naples constitutes a paradigmatic example of the uneven spatial dynamics affecting cities in the Global South, which encompasses and extends spatial dyads of power (colonizer/colonized, hegemony/subalternity).