Abstract
In Dr. No, Ian Fleming’s 1958 novel, Cold War hero James Bond must defeat the Cold War villain Doctor No and his Jamaican Chinese henchmen, who Fleming calls “Chinese Negroes” or the “Chigroes.” This article examines the characterization of hybridity as a threat to British purity and empire represented in Doctor No, who is of German and Chinese ancestry, and his mixed-race African, Chinese minions. Set in Jamaica, the novel, the sixth of the James Bond series, provides a fascinating, intimate portrait of pre-independence Kingston and Afro-Asian intimacies. Though the representation of these Afro-Asian intimacies are largely erased from the 1962 film, Dr. No, the first of the major James Bond movies, race is coded in various Orientalist forms, including yellowface. In many ways, both the novel and the film can be viewed as responses to the crisis of decolonization for Britain. The Chigroes and Doctor No come to represent a Black and Yellow Peril perhaps triggered by the Afro-Asian coalitions that were beginning to form at conferences such as Bandung in 1955 that threatened to decenter Europe.