Cash from chaos: Capitalism and the culture of organized crime in America.

Abstract

The dissertation examines the cultural and economic history of organized crime in the United States, focusing on the manner in which the discourse of gangsterism and the meaning of crime condition not only common understandings of economic activity, but also the very shape of modern capitalism itself. This inquiry reconsiders the political consequences of the way in which accepted forms of capitalist accumulation are distinguished from crime and other illicit means of profiteering. By focusing on twentieth-century cultural production, this project analyzes how narratives about organized crime articulate anxieties about the place of economic relations in everyday life and the political structure of wealth and power in the US, and it foregrounds the insufficiencies inherent in many literary, social, and theoretical models commonly used to address gangsterism. The first part provides an introduction to the inquiry by tracing the historical development of organized crime in various contexts, and by situating the methodology of this inquiry in current literary theory and cultural analysis. As a means of analyzing how gangster narratives can work to galvanize political sentiments and articulate strategies of cultural opposition, the second part examines the political, and economic significance of the mobster Dutch Schultz in the works of William S. Burroughs and E. L. Doctorow. Both Burroughs and Doctorow engage the history of organized crime's development of a corporate system of management in order to recapture the violence of gangsterism toward forms of political and economic authority as a means of narrating and confronting contemporary economic crises. Moreover, the second section examines how both authors take advantage of the representational dilemmas that organized crime poses in hopes of building alternative economic systems and cultures within capitalism itself.