Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн
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The extant literature, both print and filmic, has too oft en treated the South Carolina transplant as just some apolitical eccentric who found surfing and got stoked; at the same time, it has considerably exaggerated his contribution to surfing’s early-twentieth-century resurgence. Joseph Funderburg, for instance, maintained that Ford was “the mastermind who was responsible for the revival of surfing and one of the builders of the new Hawaii.” Joel Smith believed it “tempting to think there might not have been a revival at all” if not for Ford. And for Ben Marcus, Ford was one of three haoles—Marcus included the mixed-blood Hawaiian waterman George Freeth in that category—“who led the rebirth” of the sport.51 But contrary to these and other accounts, and as Isaiah Helekunihi Walker importantly reminds us, surfing was not an extinct pastime resurrected by the recently arrived haole.52 It had in fact already been experiencing a re naissance among a new generation of mostly Hawaiian men.53 Walker speculated that this was because “the surf offered escape and autonomy for Kanaka Maoli [Hawaiians] in an unsettling time.”54 The United States had recently annexed Hawai‘i in the face of overwhelming Hawaiian opposition, and the islands’ powerful haole elite was rendering the native population increasingly marginal as the annexationists consolidated their wealth, power, and privilege. What ever the reason a number of young Hawaiians took to the ocean at the turn of the century, there is no doubt that Hawaiian surfers were already riding the waves of Waikiki when Ford (followed weeks later by Jack London, who admiringly referred to these Hawaiians as “black Mercury[s]” and “natural king[s],” members of the “kingly species” who have “mastered matter and the brutes and lorded it over creation”) first entered the waters off O‘ahu in 1907.55