Narratives on Criminal Associations in the “Network Society”: Which Literary Reconfigurations for Which Conspiracies?

This article argues that contemporary fictions of organized crime reinscribe, in many ways, the imaginary of conspiracy in narrative structures rooted in immediate history, while aiming to critique new ramified and diffuse systems of power. Which procedures are used to uncover the secrecy surrounding these organizations? How do these works reformulate concerns about the localization of power in today’s “network society” that has emerged with economic globalization? Using examples from contemporary Italian literature, I will examine the ways in which authors write about mafia practices, accompanying the social sciences’ reclassification of organized crime as a phenomenon of power. I will also ponder the effects generated by these narratives, in which the distancing of conspiracy theories does not exclude certain reformulations of them with other terms.