Bondian Cold War
James Bond, Ian Fleming’s irrepressible and ubiquitous ‘spy,’ is often understood as a Cold Warrior, but James Bond’s Cold War diverged from the actual global conflict in subtle but significant ways.
That tension between the real and fictional provides perspectives into Cold War culture transcending ideological and geopolitical divides. The Bondiverse is complex and multi-textual, including novels, films, video games, and even a comic strip, and has also inspired an array of homages, copies, and competitors. Awareness of its rich possibilities only becomes apparent through a multi-disciplinary lens.
The desire to consider current trends in Bondian studies inspired a conference entitled ‘The Bondian Cold War,’ convened at Tallinn University, Estonia in June 2019. Conference participants, drawn from three continents and multiple disciplines – film studies, history, intelligence studies, and literature, as well as intelligence practitioners – offered papers on the literary and cinematic aspects of the ‘spy’, discussed fact versus fiction in the Bond canon, went in search of a global Bond, and pondered gender and sexuality across the Bondiverse.
This volume of essays inspired by that conference, suitable for students, researchers, and anyone interested in Cold War culture, makes vital contributions to understanding Bond as a global phenomenon, across traditional divisions of East and West, and beyond the end of the Cold War from which he emerged.
Martin D. Brown, F.R.Hist.S., is a diplomatic historian at Richmond American University. Between 2018 and 2019, he was Lead Researcher at the Centre of Excellence in Intercultural Studies, Tallinn University. His publications include Slovakia in History (2011), and ‘Executors or creative deal-makers? The role of the diplomats in the making of the Helsinki CSCE’, with Dr Angela Romano (2019).
Ronald J. Granieri is Professor of History at the United States Army War College and Director of the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His publications include The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949–1966 (2003).
Muriel Blaive is a historian of Czech communism and post-communism. She is currently Elise Richter Fellow at Graz University. She edited a special issue of East Central Europe on “Surveillance of Culture, Culture of Surveillance” (October 2022), and of East European Politics and Societies on “Writing on Communist History” (August 2022).