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

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One of the hallmarks of surf culture in the post–World War II era has been its close relationship to Third World tourism. In this respect, surfing has mirrored U.S. foreign policy, as both were deeply concerned with the so-called peripheral states of the Cold War, and both placed primacy in the exploitation of those nations’ resources. For the U.S. government, it was the oil, copper, rubber, and other minerals and commodities desired by American corporations; for surfers, it was the waves. Yet where Washington was concerned that revolutionary nationalism might interfere with America’s grand strategy of global capitalism, surfers’ concerns generally began and ended at the water’s edge. For them, what happened on land—the national liberation movements of Africa, the counterinsurgency warfare of Central America, the state-sponsored repression of Southeast Asia—was of little serious concern. The waves were all that mattered.

If the Hollywood beach films of the 1950s and 1960s hinted at surfing’s commercial ambitions, the growing surf exploration of the postwar era, such as that portrayed in Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer (1966), was at the heart of surf culture’s more organic foundations. The advent of commercial jet travel in the 1950s, in particular, afforded surfers an opportunity to seek out new wave frontiers. A growing number of haoles brought to Hawai‘i by their military service began to call the islands home, while Mexico and other Latin American countries became favored stomping grounds for American surf travelers. Chapter 2 focuses on the growth of global surf tourism from the 1940s through the 1970s, viewing such tourism as an unofficial form of cultural diplomacy. Accompanying these jaunts, I argue, was the construction of an exceedingly simplistic surfing imagination. For the surf travelers of the post–World War II period, the political universe of the Cold War was banished from surfing’s popular grand narrative. Surfers preferred to see themselves as pioneers navigating a world of bountiful waves and always-smiling locals who lived in lands uncomplicated by imperial concerns.