Ian Fleming and the Politics of Ambivalence - Paperback

by Ian Kinane (Author)

Previously considered an avowed nationalist, this book explores how Ian Fleming's writings and his representational politics contain an implicit resistance to imperial rhetoric. Through an examination of Fleming's Jamaica-set novels Live and Let Die, Dr. No, and The Man with the Golden Gun, as well as the later film adaptations of these novels, Ian Kinane reveals Fleming's deep ambivalence to British decolonisation and to wider Anglo-Caribbean relations. Offered here is a crucial insight into the public imagination during the birth of modern British multiculturalism that encompasses broader links between Fleming's writings on race and the representation of early British-Jamaican cultural relations. By exploring the effects of racial representation in these popular works, Kinane connects the novels to more contemporary concerns regarding migration and the ways in which the misrepresentation of cultures, races, and peoples has led to fraught and contentious global geo-political relations as figured in the fictional icon, James Bond.

Author Biography

Ian Kinane is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton, UK, where he convenes the MA in Popular Literature and Culture. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including Isn't it Ironic?: Irony in Contemporary Popular Culture (2021), Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade (2019), Theorising Literary Islands (2016) and (with Downey and Parker) Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place (2016). He is also the General Editor of the International Journal of James Bond Studies.