Famously, Ian Fleming wrote all of the Bond novels and novellas on his estate in Jamaica, and he set several of the stories on the island. In comparison, the film series began its adventures in Jamaica, in Dr. No, but did not return until what was proven to be the final EON production, No Time to Die, where Daniel Craig made something of a show of returning to the Fleming-esque idyll as a retreat from service, before his final and fatal adventure. Nevertheless, many Bond films have frequented the Caribbean islands throughout their run, as if displacing the Jamaican point of origin and scattering it in a nomadic distribution across the archipelago. This symbolizes a problematic relationship with traditional hierarchy, both challenged and maintained, in relation to the legacy of the imperial mainland – both the UK and the USA, as powers of production (increasingly problematic). 

This paper aims to delve into this ambiguous state of affairs by associating the secret agent with the “archipelagic” and “abyssal” thinking of Édouard Glissant, a postcolonial geopoetics and geophilosophy to challenge “continental” imperialist thought, in an attempt to problematize the significance of the apparent escapism of the Bond mythos. Significantly, this mythos also reveals Bond’s affinity with another secretive and cunning archipelagic figure: Odysseus. The Caribbean métissage (mixing of races) would therefore be conflated with the Odyssean polymêtis (thinking as ruse) as conjoining, hybridizing strategies to understand the destiny of James Bond as a transformative, mythopoetic character of significant importance to thinking critically the conditions of thought and action in the presumed post-colonial and post-Cold War era, but also problematizing the contemporary paradox of neo-imperialist globality and hyper-nationalist insularity.