Addiopizzo travel: the multimodal discourse of a civil antimafia movement in global tourism discourse

Abstract

Objective - This paper aims at describing performative class action, emergent tourist imagination and reconceptualization of crime (Thurlow & Jaworski 2014, Ferrell 2013) in videos by and about the anti-racketeering Addiopizzo travel tourism movement in Sicily. These videoreportages show traditional touristic urban or rural sites under new angles, moving away from a traditional Grand Tour conception of the Sicilian countryside and monumental highlights, towards coverage about community based tourism entreprises against the madia, such as B&B accommodation or cooperatives producing ethical products, in other, less monumental settings such as confiscated mafia property transformed positively in social projects for bio-agriculture as well as in in Palermo’s popular shops refusing to pay protection money. Framework - This presentation analyzes the multimodal discourse about Addiopizzo travel as a linguistic window into social innovation (Heller et al. 2014, Cappelli 2013): both with respect to the genre of the touristic videoreportage about Sicily and through the co-construction of alternative framings of mafia in Sicilian society (Gilliam & Iyengar 2005, Hillahan 2011). The framework is multimodal critical discourse analysis, which studies meaning-making through the combination of linguistic and visual resources in video documentaries (Kress 2010, Jewitt 2013, Bateman & Wildfeuer 2014, Wildfeuer 2014, Hiipala 2016). Context - Addiopizzo arose as a grassroots movement by entrepreneurs refusing to pay extortion money, opposing to the traditional resilience by the Sicilian population fatalistically undergoing intimidation and omertà imposed by Cosa Nostra, another view: the marginalization of Mafia, the emergence of a local responsible economy as a form of public resistance and collective cultural revolution against organized crime (Forno and Gunnarson 2010, Forno 2015, Rubdi & Ben Said 2015). Recently, the movement started acting as a travel organization, extending its focus to consumer strategy in responsible tourism, by means of study trips for schools or informative and leisure excursions for other interested travelers worldwide. The goal of this organization is to show how civil society can oppose organized crime successfully and bring antimafia experience to local and national or global touristic audiences moving beyond proletarian class struggle and involving interclass and transnational contestation and resistance to the mafia (Santino 2008, Rubdy & Ben Said 2015). Corpus and methodology – Our corpus consists of 10 Italian and English travel reportages on YouTube displaying the Addiopizzo travel movement, posted between 2014 and 2017: the items reach from the group’s own promotion videos to Italian regional or national TV news coverage on regional activist channels or Italy’s national RAI to short European documentaries on British or American TV, and even independent amateur videos by customers (Dunn 2005a, 2005b; Francesconi 2015a, 2015b). The method used is a functionally oriented corpus-based multimodal analysis (O’Halloran 2008, Bednarek 2015). A central hypothesis is that videodiscourse multimodally displays social relations and tensions between mafia and non-mafia actors and reflects social change performed by antimafia organizations across speech and visual elements in discourse about the mafia and Sicily (Iedema 2003, Di Ronco & Lavorgna 2016). (Expected) results – We provide a classification for the following three discursive strategies used by Addiopizzo Travel in Italian and English. (i) We examine genre variation (Francesconi 2014) in the antimafia tourism video reportages defined in terms of their pre-/on-/post-trip travel status, their format, such as TV news coverage, interviews, videoblogs (Azariah 2016) and the like, as well as the institutional source of the video production (the Addiopizzo travel organization itself or traditional national and regional public, private or alternative television stations, as well as individual vlogs). (ii) We describe patterns of mediated action remediated interaction, and, possibly co-construction between two types of social actors: Addiopizzo hosts (entrepreneurs and the organization’s representatives) and tourists (Italian and foreign, represented directly (i.e. as they interact during activities or multimodally perform actions) or indirectly (as they are spoken about and mentioned in absence) (Van Leeuwen 1996, Author, Thurlow & Jaworski 2014, Pappalepore & Smith 2016, Forno & Garibaldi 2016). We zoom in on the social movements’s represented actions involving such actors: these are no longer restricted to the mere display of public protest and/or information in a climate of failing direct legal or law enforcement nor as a classical working-class or rural social struggle against mafia hegemony (Santino 2008). In the corpus, they present themselves, instead, as active players in changing their local socio-economic tissue, as they replace traditional schemas of exploitation by new, sustainable educational and economic activities which involve in their activism heterogeneous other interclass civil actors as well as transregional and transnational connections with their hosts in the joint process of production and consumption of the touristic community-based experience. Local activists-hosts and their Italian or foreign clients take part in shared indirect antimafia experiences and preventive activities which eventually lead to co-construction of the touristic destination. (iii) We provide an overview of Addiopizzo’s legitimation and justification strategies and framings of social change, as a reversible destiny for the city and its citizens (Schneider & Schneider 2003), which reshuffles more conventional, sometimes fatalistic, romantic and fictional representations of mafia culture, and even straightforward denial of the Mafia’s existence (Jerne 2015, 2016; Di Piazza 2010; Poppi & Di Piazza 2017). Such discursive strategies show clients as they interact with local activists and react to mafia stereotypes during their stay in Italy.

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status: published