Exposing the ‘Ndrangheta. The multimodal representation of Italian MafiaS as a stratified construct

Exposing the ‘Ndrangheta. The multimodal representation of Italian MafiaS as a stratified construct The 2007 gruesome killings of Italian mafiosi in Duisburg, Germany, marked a major change in the perception and the awareness of the ‘Ndrangheta, the crime syndicate thriving in the tip of Italy, Calabria. Until then, there was very little knowledge of this criminal organization, which was hardly distinguished from the different criminal groups active in Italy (Gratteri/Nicaso 2007). 2007 also marked a historical turning point in the discursive representation of the Italian Mafia(S) in European media. From a linguistic perspective, our study focuses on the change, following 2007, in discursive strategies employed by Mafia experts in naming, defining and popularizing the emerging reality of the ‘Ndrangheta, in line with the reflections on evolving recontextualized (Fairclough 2010) concepts in the Discourse-historical Approach (Wodak 2010; Reisigl/Wodak 2009). The study examines a 2007 BBC documentary presented by a British expert on the ‘Ndrangheta with a view to investigating: - instances of multimodal interdiscursivity in relation to references to the Mafia derived from other genres (e.g. news reports, investigative journalism, literature, history books, picture movies, footage, police recordings) (Jewitt 2009, Dickie 2012); - strategies of ‘singularization’ (Wodak 2010) emerging in the process of naming and of contructing the identity of this crime syndicate, which displays autonomous practices, codes of conduct and sets of beliefs in contrast with the more widely known ‘Cosa Nostra’ and ‘Camorra’. Both dimensions shed light on the emergence of multimodal traits in the genre under investigation (Garzone/Catenaccio/Degano 2012; Bathia/Bhatia 2004, Bhatia 2010, 2012), which seems to appropriate features of ‘embedded journalism’.