When it comes to the exotic East in the James Bond franchise, 007 is frequently immersed in the chaotic spaces of the Eastern city and, in the films under discussion here, their mainstream movie centerpiece: the street market or bazaar. Across actors (Connery, Moore, Brosnan, Craig) and global cities, the super spy has brought his West-meets-East action to metropolitan locales from Tokyo (You Only Live Twice), to Hong Kong (Die Another Day, The Man with the Golden Gun, You Only Live Twice), to Istanbul (From Russia with Love, The World is Not Enough, Skyfall), to Saigon (Tomorrow Never Dies). As a public commercial district, the Eastern bazaar is a site of spectacle, display, and consumption as well as a social space where both hybrid identity and cultural tourism are made visible. The bazaar is where an encounter with Otherness is a certainty and, like other urban zones, is a contested space between the traditional and the contemporary. “It represents the sensuous, the ‘raw’, the down to earth, the possibilities of sensory stimulation, and intrigue” (Vicdan and Fırat 2015, 13). These characteristics are not unlike James Bond himself.

The Bond of our two most recent eras—those played by Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig—encounter the Eastern bazaar and they each do so in the company of a woman of color in Tomorrow Never Dies (UK/USA: Roger Spottiswoode, 1997) and in Skyfall (UK/USA: Sam Mendes, 2012), respectively.