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"Organized crime Fiction"
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Dark times in the city
Danny Callaghan's having a quiet drink in a Dublin pub when two men walk in with guns. On impulse, Callaghan intervenes to help the intended victim, petty criminal Walter Bennett. With a troubled past and an uncertain future, Callaghan finds himself drawn into a vicious scheme of revenge.
Book
Neoliberal Capitalism in the Indian Organized Crime Fiction of Vikram Chandra and Salman Rushdie
Close study reveals the systemically interwoven nature of the criminal and licit sectors of capitalist economies, yet capitalist society seeks to legitimize the latter sector by attempting to hegemonically externalize or Other the former. It often does so by associating the criminal sector with stigmatized minority and/or immigrant groups, who are blamed for all of society's ills. Placing blame in this way allows the capitalist ownership class to falsely pass itself off as virtuous and free of the taint of criminality or of having engaged in criminal acts. There is a systematic sociocultural denial of the fact that capitalism produces all forms of conceivable capitalist accumulation, regardless of whether they accord with received notions of morality or legality. This essay argues that Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games and Salman Rushdie's novels The Moor's Last Sigh and The Golden House challenge this hegemonic Manichean conceptualization of crime and capitalism by thematizing the close relationships between capitalism and organized criminality in India. In the face of a socioeconomic system whose spiraling material inequalities are eroding democracy and fueling the rise of fundamentalist nationalisms, these novels counter the hegemonic legitimizing narratives that present success within the world of neoliberal capitalism as a function of meritocratic entrepreneurialness. They also present a perspective on organized crimes that resists the doxa that criminal acts and capitalist successes are wholly discrete, disparate phenomena.
Journal Article
Matsotsi: The Migrant Detective and the Postcolonial State
Recent work on crime fiction has highlighted the genre’s increasingly transnational focus and the growing number of migrant detectives. Matsotsi, a little-known Nyanja text published in Zambia in the early 1960s, provides a much earlier example of this figure in Sergeant Balala, an Angolan detective fighting to contain the tsotsi menace in Johannesburg, South Africa. Matsotsi, however, does more than point to cross-border detection as a means of elucidating transnational relationships. Shonga and Zulu’s text manipulates the genres of the detective novel and the bildungsroman to tell a story about the relationships among the individual, the state, and the wider region at a key moment in southern African history, when Zambia and Malawi were on the cusp of independence. Although African language writing has often been considered too localized to be used for nationalist purposes, here it is mobilized for the purpose of state-making in a transnational context.
Journal Article
RESPONSE TO FRAULEY, SIMECEK, SLUGAN, AND WHITECROSS
The purpose of this article is to conclude this special issue of the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology by responding to Jon Frauley, Karen Simecek, Mario Slugan, and Rosalchen Whitecross' criticisms of A Criminology of Narrative Fiction. I am very grateful to editor-in-chief David Polizzi for this opportunity and, as always, flattered that my peers have devoted so much time to reading the monograph and writing about it, regardless of whether their evaluations are encouraging or disparaging. A response to each of the issues raised by each of the critics at a corresponding level of detail is not possible within the confines of a journal article so I have restricted my reply to the most compelling objections against my argument from each critic.
Journal Article
How Human Trafficking Fuels Erosion of Liberal Democracies—In Fiction and Fact, and from within and without
On the same day that the human trafficker Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment, many people closely watched the sixth hearing of the House Select Committee on the attack of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021 (28 June 2022). What, if anything, do these ostensibly varied crimes have in common? Seeking to answer this fundamental question, this article explores the usually under-researched connection between trafficking in persons and the documented decline of liberal democracies worldwide. Globally, democratic societies governed by the rule of law appear to be under assault, and therefore this article explores relevant examples of how human trafficking contributes to the erosion of liberal democracy, in fiction and fact, and from within and without. In other words, this article takes us from ‘Pizzagate’ to profits.
Journal Article