James Bond, excluding racist terms from new editions of novels

The new English edition of the James Bond novels will be cleaned up of the most racist passages: words like “negro”, “black” or “African” will disappear from the pages forever. After the controversy over the editing of the texts by the English writer Roald Dahl broke out in recent days, now it’s the turn of the books of another popular British author, Ian Fleming.

An article published by the London newspaper «The Telegraph» reveals that before the reprint of the novels of the creator of secret agent 007, scheduled for April on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of «Casino Royale», the first book of the spy saga, the Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, which owns the copyrights, commissioned a review to delete words that today could cause controversy for their inappropriateness.

Each new edition of James Bond will carry the caption: “This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes were common that might be considered offensive by modern readers.”

For the next edition of ‘Casino Royale’ some updates have been made, while maintaining maximum fidelity to the original text and the period in which it is set, a spokesman for Ian Fleming Publications Ltd told the ‘Telegraph’.

A pejorative term commonly used for black people by Fleming, whose Bond books were published between 1951 and 1966, has been removed: ‘nigger’ has been replaced with ‘coloured person’ or ‘black man’.

In other cases, the references have changed. For example, in Live and Let Die (1954), Bond’s view of Africans in the gold and diamond trade as “pretty law-abiding fellows, except when they’ve had too much to drink” was changed to “Pretty law-abiding types, in my opinion.”

Alterations to this novel had been authorized by Fleming himself before his death in 1964. Another scene in the book, set during a Harlem nightclub striptease, was originally “Bond heard the audience gasp and grunt like pigs at the feeder”.

It was changed to “Bond could sense the electrical voltage in the room.” In many books, including “Thunderball” (1961), “Quantum of Solace” (1960) and “Goldfinger” (1959), ethnicities have been eliminated.

«Following Ian Flaming’s approach, we looked at the occurrences of different racial terms in the books and either removed a number of individual words or replaced them with terms that are more accepted today but in keeping with the period in which the books were written» said Ian Fleming Publications Ltd.