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.
By:
Scott Laderman
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Volume: 1
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 23mm
Weight: 499g
ISBN: 9780520279100
ISBN 10: 0520279107
Series: Sport in World History
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 03 March 2014
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION. A Political History of Surfing CHAPTER 1. How Surfing Became American: The Imperial Roots of Modern Surf Culture CHAPTER 2. A World Made Safe for Discovery: Travel, Cultural Diplomacy, and the Politics of Surf Exploration CHAPTER 3. Paradise Found: The Discovery of Indonesia and the Surfing Imagination CHAPTER 4. When Surfing Discovered It Was Political: Confronting South African Apartheid CHAPTER 5. Industrial Surfing: The Commodification of Experience EPILOGUE. A New Millennium NOTES INDEX
Scott Laderman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and the author of Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory.
Reviews for Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing
What Laderman presents is a fascinating account of a sport whose proponents believed it to be apolitical, but facing the politics of a modern world. H-Net 20150115 Laderman's history offers intriguing moments in which he pulls together surfing narratives of soldiers and other state agents- illustrating the degree to which pleasure and power were intimately linked in the world that American foreign policy produced. -- Vernadette Vicun~a Gonzalez The Journal of American History 20150301
