Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн

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While surfing was a pastime enjoyed for centuries in ancient Hawai‘i, it was nearly extinguished following Hawaiians’ contact with the West. Empire in Waves begins, as does modern surfing, with an examination of this decline—as well as the early years of surfing’s revival and globalization—in the context of American empire-building. In the nineteenth century, Congregationalist missionaries endeavored to remake much of Hawaiian society and culture as part of a general Western effort to “civilize” the barbarous residents of the island chain while, at the same time, dispossessing them of their native lands. Such was the missionaries’ success in uplifting the “infant race” that, one contemporaneous observer noted, by the early 1890s it had become exceedingly difficult to “find a surf-board outside of our museums and private collections.” The imperial project would shift , however, following Washington’s annexation of the Hawaiian Islands just several years later. As chapter 1 demonstrates, surfing, in the first decades of the twentieth century, underwent a surge of popularity as boosters such as Alexander Hume Ford sought to transform Hawai‘i into a “white man’s state,” turn Waikiki into a beckoning paradise for the growing number of Pacific tourists, and establish the islands more broadly as a crucial outpost of American global power. No longer a disreputable pastime of licentious natives, surfing was used to sell Hawaiian tourism—and white settlement—in popular magazines and promotional literature, in the process strengthening the grip of the haole class over the native population with whom the sport originated.