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Spying in Gagool’s Cave: James Bond’s Colonial Adventures

2016; De Gruyter; Volume: 134; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1515/ang-2016-0052

1865-8938

Wieland Schwanebeck,

South Asian Cinema and Culture

This article assesses the colonial legacy in the long-running James Bond franchise. While various Bond scholars have repeatedly stressed the 007 franchise's indebtedness to the geopolitical coordinates and mentality of 19th century imperialism and to the Victorian era's ideals of masculinity, this article is the first one to read a Bond film (A View to a Kill, Roger Moore's final adventure in the role as 007) as an adaptation of a colonialist-era pretext, in this case: H. Rider Haggard's seminal Africa novel, King Solomon's Mines (1885). Out of the numerous parallels drawn between both texts, the role of the aged adventurer, the significance of the map and its psychosexual connotations, as well as the nightmarish construction of an animalistic, racialised female Other are highlighted in this reading. It culminates in a brief assessment of the most recent Bond films, as both Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015), in spite of some (postcolonial) adjustments, continue to be indebted to an imperialist mental framework.