THE CULTURES OF JAMES BOND
Saarland University
Saarbruecken, Germany
5 - 7 June 2009
Deadline for proposals: 30 November 2008

Since his earliest appearances in print and on the screen, James Bond has
become a popular icon and has developed nothing short of his own cultural
mythology. His iconic status today may well hide the fact that through
the years, "James Bond" has acquired very different meanings in a variety
of contexts. He has provided a screen onto which the heterogeneous
desires of nationally, culturally and socially diverse readers, viewers
and users have been projected. In addition, Bond has long become an
academic topic as well, not just in film studies, but also in literary
and cultural studies. As a cultural phenomenon entangled in the histories
not only of Western cultures since World War II, Bond more than merits a
conference as a forum to discuss new approaches and recent revisions.

Bond has been around:
Both as a fictional character and as a cultural product, Bond has crossed
national, media, and generic boundaries.
We invite papers on topics including:
• Bond and tourism - travelling in and with Bond
• Nomadic Bond - concepts of space in the films and novels
• National, international, transnational Bonds
• Bond and Englishness/Britishness; national appropriations; Bond's
international appeal;Bond and the transnational
• Bond and (trans-, inter-)mediality - crossing generic and media
boundaries; films and novels; spin-offs; parodies; Bond in games,
graphic novels, etc.

Bond is different:
Constructions of Bond can be analysed by focussing on categories based on
difference.
Topics might include:
• Ethnicity – post- and neo-colonial approaches
• Class – Bond as class(less) hero and/or as a representative of an upper
class; patterns of consumption based on class; the social stratifications
surrounding Bond; the utopian and dystopian 'other' communities
• Gender – constructions and performances of maleness, masculinity and
femininity
• Ethics – Bond and the ethical turn, Bond's turns on ethics
• Bond and cultural hermeneutics

Bond means culture and politics:
The interactions of the written, visual, material and digital texts of
Bond with their social, political, cultural and/or historical contexts
have already proved a rewarding field of enquiry.
Papers might focus specifically on:
• Bond, history and historiography
• The (cultural) politics and ideologies of Bond
• The semiotics of Bond
• Bond and material culture
• Bond, fandom, fetishization, desire

Bond is big business:
Commercial aspects of popular culture have been intensely debated since
the 1940s.
With regard to Bond, topics might include:
• Bond as franchise – forms of production, marketing, etc.
• Bond and commodity culture – selling, buying, consuming Bond
• Bond and the processes of signification in the age of digital capitalism
• Canonizing and institutionalizing Bond in academia

Proposals should be max. 200 words in length. Send proposals by email as
pasted-in documents or attachments in an up-to-date format to:
frenk_at_mx.uni-saarland.de and christian.krug_at_angl.phil.uni-
erlangen.de. Deadline: 30 November 2008.



-- 
Iain Robert Smith
Institute of Film and Television
School of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham
University Park
NG7 2RD

Head of Communications,
MeCCSA Post-Graduate Network
website: http://www.meccsa.org.uk/pgn/

Articles Editor,
Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies
website: http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/