Edward Said: Orientalism & James Bond Genre



Edward Said’s essay, “Orientalism,” discusses the Western conception of the Middle East from the West’s imperialist penetrations and attempted dominance from Napoleon’s attack of Egypt in the eighteenth century on. Orientalism is a word that Said gives ownership of to the West’s perception and condescension to the Middle East and perhaps other previously colonized areas.  He explains how the post-Enlightenment West was able to form “Orientalism” as an unequal half to the Occident through “scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains. Of course, this was all accompanied by the military strength of the West. He questions knowledge gleaned entirely from text as opposed to knowledge attained by personal experience, with the implication that had Europeans learned of the Orient through the latter, they would have a different perception of Oriental reality. The West’s world hegemony created by their imperialist dominance, a Oriental inferior “Other.”

His conception of the West view of the Orient as inferior established a rationalization for the West’s imperialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. He gives an example of Britain’s attempt to maintain an image of superiority by making mandatory for colonial administrators to retire at the age of fifty-five, thus keeping the British image to the colonized as powerful and youthful. However, as Cynthia Baron notes in her essay, “Doctor No: Bonding Britishness to racial sovereignty,” from 1945 to 1960 British lost or relinquished control of its colonial empire “some 500 million people in former British Dependencies who became completely self-governing. These formerly colonized were people of color, and Baron illustrates how the British film industry incorporates subtle and not too subtle implications of British white racial superiority through their Bond film, and uses Ian Fleming’s Dr. No, as an example. At the time of his writing these novels, his James Bond persona gave a very troubling British response to the unprecedented immigration from the West Indies, India and Pakistan. By the mid-1960s. 2 percent of Britain’s total population was already made up of people from the colonies.” (Baron p. 139). She underscores the  “ ‘sneaky Asians and ‘bungling’ that are reflected in the Bond movie.  

It may be ironic, however, when Baron mentions that Ian Fleming’s original intent with these novels may have been as a kind of parody or spoof at the typical patriarchal macho spy character. His Bond character is quite courageous in his action to combat our cold war communist adversaries—the  Russians and the Red Chinese. (I recall reading as a teenager that in an interview around 1959 John F. Kennedy, our future president mentioned that his favorite author was Ian Fleming, which led to the author’s overwhelming popularity.) Baron alludes to Edward Said’s “Orientalism” throughout her discourse and basically agrees with Said that the antagonists in Bond’s spy thrillers are  often the embodiment of the Oriental representing the Other. As Baron implies, the British became a cultural leader of West with these aexports of admired Bond films and  trendy  music even if they were not an empire anymore.