Publisher Description

Global James Bond: (Re) Imagining and Transplanting a Popular Culture Icon focuses on the ambivalent yet fascinating interplay between the global and the local in the longest running film franchise in history. It explores how James Bond established itself as a global standard for action-spy film making and even as a minor global cinema (i.e. imagining), and hot the franchise subsequently inspired a series of genre bending, blending, and breaking in local visual and some literary contexts (i.e. reimagining and transplanting). The chapters in this collection consider how the world is envisaged in the official series and subsequently reinterpreted on local and regional levels and how investments with alternative meanings might run counter to the dominant representational and geo-political logics of the novels and filmic texts. Global James Bond is a starting point for further conversation and exchange over an extraordinary film franchise.

Author Biography

Klaus Dodds is executive dean of the school of life sciences and environment and professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a fellow of the academy of social sciences.Lisa Funnell is associate dean of creative industries at Mohawk College.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Is the World Enough For James Bond?Monica GermanàAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Global James BondLisa Funnell and Klaus DoddsPart I: Interplay of Global and LocalChapter 1. James Bond a la MexicanaDavid WiltChapter 2. James Bonds (OSS 117 and C.I.D. Shankar) in the Global South: Orientalism, "MadScientists," and TechnologySwarnavel EswaranChapter 3. Nostalgic Humor and Cultural Memory in the Remakes of Hong Kong Jane BondFilmsJessica Siu-yin YeungChapter 4. Contrasting Sensibilities: Golgo 13, Japanese Masculinity, and Differing Expectationsof the Bond ArchetypeAaron D. HortonPart II: Creative and Consumptive GeographiesChapter 5. Assassins, Cigars, and Revolution: James Bond's CubaAntii KorpisaariChapter 6. Bond in Japan: International Pride, National Disgrace, and Glo/Cal IntricaciesRea AmitChapter 7. The Women Are Not Enough: Colonial Consumption, Universal Exports, and FamilyLineage in OHMSSLisa FunnellChapter 8. The (Mediterranean) World Is Not Enough: Locating Europe's Global South in ForYour Eyes OnlyPaul Michael JohnsonAfterword: "Take Me Around the World One More Time"James PageAbout the Contributors

Review

A delectable dossier deftly addressing the global dissemination of James Bond, this collection makes a major argument that the Bond franchise is more than merely a minor global cinema. Tracking Bond through an itinerary teeming with unexpected stops, Global James Bond pays visits to Mexico, South India, Hong Kong and Cuba, amongst other locales, to (re)imagine local receptions and (re)readings of the globetrotting spy over the past half century. It is sure to please cosmopolitan Bond aficionados in its focus on the interplay of the global and local.
Global James Bond tracks an exchange that knows few borders--a relay between Bond media and various social-political and aesthetic contexts which receive, absorb, mimic, alter, pillage, and subvert Bond, reinforcing 007's status as a mobile signifier of truly global reach. What's especially refreshing about this collection is that its authors by turns center and decenter the iconic film series, turning critical attention not just to the world as official Bond texts depict (and warp) it, but to the curious trajectories the figure of Bond has taken in unofficial texts produced in Mexico, India, Hong Kong, and Japan. The message is clear: Bond contains a world of meaning, in the literal sense of the term.
Lisa Funnell and Klaus Dodds' collection orients Bond scholarship away from the loci of Britain - and, thus, away from the manifold considerations of Bond's complex identity matrix as a "British" icon - towards a more trans-global approach to Bond's historical legacy, demonstrating persuasively the need to expand the frontiers of James Bond Studies and to engage with the implications of Bond's "global-ness" as a new critical framework.

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