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

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There has thus emerged a paradox in modern surf culture. On the one hand, surfing valorizes exploration not only for the potential discovery of waves in unspoiled paradises but also for the fostering of cross-cultural contact between surfers from the industrialized West and the millions of villagers throughout the littoral Third World. Inherent in these encounters has been a romanticization of the poor as living simple and happy lives, free of any desire for modernity. On the other hand, the corporations that have become associated with global surf culture both rely on and perpetuate that impoverished condition, fueling the “race to the bottom” by exploiting the surplus of laborers or the owners’ capital mobility when those same Third World villagers seek higher wages and better working conditions. Chapter 5 explores these unresolved tensions.

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Empire in Waves is by no means exhaustive. It is not intended to be the history of surfing. Rather, the book employs a number of important developments in modern surf culture to explore a series of premises: Surfing is not a mindless entertainment but a cultural force born of empire (at least in its modern phase), reliant on Western power, and invested in neoliberal capitalism. Acceptance of even that first premise is hardly a given. Mentions of surfing far more often elicit amused chortles involving “cool dudes” and “gnarly waves” than they do serious contemplation. But, I argue, surfing—however rooted it may be in the individual pursuit of pleasure—has been a pastime impossible to divorce from the political universe in which it originated, spread, and took root. If modern surfing was born of conquest—a reasonable argument, I suggest, in light of America’s unlawful annexation of the Hawaiian Islands in 1898—its global diffusion certainly owed a great debt to the imperial management necessitated by twentieth-century American power. It was not long before surfing’s pleasurable beach culture emerged as a staple in the globalization of American life, whether through early tourism in Hawai‘i and Latin America, the military diffusion of the sport to Japan and other oceanic locales, the Third World “surfaris” of young American travelers, or the global export of Hollywood beach films in the 1950s and 1960s. At the same time, surfing’s relationship to American power has been detached from its popular association with discovery and plea sure. Yet it was the colonization of Hawai‘i by the United States that rendered surfing American. It was American foreign policy, which favored elite-led capitalism over revolutionary socialism, that made the world safe for discovery by generations of surfers. And it was the global economic system exemplified by the “Washington consensus” that enabled the low-wage manufacture of surf culture’s sartorial accoutrements. Empire in Waves sets out to trace this international history.