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"Surfing Hawaii History."
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Empire in waves
Surfing today evokes many things: thundering waves, warm beaches, bikinis and lifeguards, and carefree pleasure. But is the story of surfing really as simple as popular culture suggests? In this first international political history of the sport, Scott Laderman shows that while wave riding is indeed capable of stimulating tremendous pleasure, its globalization went hand in hand with the blood and repression of the long twentieth century. Emerging as an imperial instrument in post-annexation Hawaii, spawning a form of tourism that conquered the littoral Third World, tracing the struggle against South African apartheid, and employed as a diplomatic weapon in America's Cold War arsenal, the saga of modern surfing is only partially captured by Gidget, the Beach Boys, and the film Blue Crush. From nineteenth-century American empire-building in the Pacific to the low-wage labor of the surf industry today, Laderman argues that surfing in fact closely mirrored American foreign relations. Yet despite its less-than-golden past, the sport continues to captivate people worldwide. Whether in El Salvador or Indonesia or points between, the modern history of this cherished pastime is hardly an uncomplicated story of beachside bliss. Sometimes messy, occasionally contentious, but never dull, surfing offers us a whole new way of viewing our globalized world.
eBook
The Hawaii Promotion Committee and the Appropriation of Surfing
The advent of digital newspapers is providing critical historical information for subjects like surfing that have traditionally had so few primary sources available to researchers. A review of newspapers from the early twentieth century reveals important new evidence that the Hawaii Promotion Committee (HPC) helped support the growth of surfing by coordinating a transpacific marketing campaign to highlight the sport for the sake of boosting tourism. However, because the HPC and the newspapers in which it published its weekly reports represented arms of the colonial powers, much of that new information must be understood in the broader context of how the local Caucasian or haole population used the newspapers to promote their own imperial vision of surfing while often ignoring or suppressing Native Hawaiian voices that represented a critical counternarrative. For their part, Native Hawaiians actively resisted the racist and pro-territorial propaganda by publishing their own newspapers and by directly competing against haole in and around the surf.
Journal Article
Making Surfboards: Emergence of a Trans-Pacific Cultural Industry
This paper contributes to an emerging postcolonial literature on the history of surfing by documenting the material cultural practice of surfboard making across Hawai'i, California and Australia. It outlines what is known of precolonial surfboard-making practices in Hawai'i and then traces important 20th-century advances in design. In contrast to popular histories of surfing that emphasise Hawaiian 'tradition' versus Californian and Australian 'innovators', this paper establishes the links, exchanges and information flows that informed evolving practices of surfboard making. Such links, exchanges and information flows were trans-Pacific in nature, even from the early 20th century, and were utterly dependent on both Hawaiian antecedents and contemporary innovations. Although not without contestation, the emergence of surfboard making as a 20th-century trans-Pacific cultural industry was premised on generosity, a sense of artisan brotherhood and an omnipresent thirst in distant corners of the Pacific Ocean for a better way to ride its waves.
Journal Article
Hui Nalu, Beachboys, and the Surfing Boarder-lands of Hawai'i
In this article I argue that the Hawaiian conceptual, cultural, and physical space called po'ina nalu (surf zone) was a borderland (or boarder-land) where colonial hegemony was less effectual and Hawaiian resistance continuous. Through the history of Hawaiian surfing clubs, specifically the Hui Nalu and the Waikīkī beachboys, Hawaiian male surfers both subverted colonial discourses—discourses that represented most Hawaiian men as passive, unmanly, and nearly invisible—and confronted political haole (white) elites who overthrew Hawai'i's Native government in the late 1800s. My ultimate conclusion is that the ocean surf was a place where Hawaiian men negotiated masculine identities and successfully resisted colonialism.
Journal Article
'Modest Monuments'?
The postage stamp issued by the USA in 2002 to commemorate Hawaiian athlete and cultural icon, Duke Kahanamoku, represented the culmination of a 30-year plus lobbying campaign involving a wide cross-section of interest groups. Via this prominent example, this paper examines postage stamps as an under-explored form of social memory and historical evidence and questions the weight and importance of stamps relative to other types of social memory. Intuitively, postage stamps might appear to be a relatively insignificant form of evidence; certainly, they have not been widely utilised by historians, including Pacific historians. Through an examination of the origins, semiotics and impact of the Kahanamoku stamp, this paper argues that stamps have the potential to reveal broad, underlying cultural forces and meanings, and re-evaluates their commemorative and interpretive effectiveness alongside other, complementary forms of social memory.
Journal Article
SURFERS, SCAMMERS, AND THE COUNTERCULTURE
Today, the expression “waterman” has been reduced to a marketing cliché used to sell stand-up paddle boards and other detritus of the so-called “surfing lifestyle.” There was a time when the word carried great weight, designating the maritime equivalent of a black belt in a great martial art. It was not enough simply to surf. A waterman had to have mastered all the aquatic arts: he was a skilled diver, canoe surfer, oarsman, meteorologist, sailor, ocean swimmer, body surfer, lifesaver, tandem surfer, fisherman, and board/boatbuilder who could ride any size surf on any craft put underneath him. Pioneer watermen like
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