Ian Fleming and the Politics of Ambivalence

Previously considered an avowed nationalist, this book explores how Ian Fleming’s writing 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, The Man with the Golden Gun, his short stories and the later film adaptations, Ian Kinane reveal's 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 British-Jamaican culture and various race-related crises in Britain - such as the Notting Hill Riots and the Brixton Riots. By exploring the effects of racial representation in these popular works, Kinane connects the novels to more contemporary conservative 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.