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

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The surfing display at Expo ’70 may be a minor footnote in the larger history of U.S. cultural diplomacy, but it illustrates one of the ways that surfing increasingly intersected with American global power. It also starkly illuminates the extent to which surfing, like Hawai‘i, had become naturalized as somehow American. Those U.S. military personnel who rode waves in Japan after 1945 were participants in the same twentieth-century globalization that saw such disparate phenomena as the export of Hollywood beach films and the creation of Osaka’s surfing exhibit. But this was not an exclusively American globalization. Surfing offered an increasingly global culture. The Third World “surfaris” of young wave-riding enthusiasts who built an international fraternity helped to ensure as much. Australian waterman Peter Troy may have been the first serious explorer—or at least the first to attract a great deal of attention—but he was hardly alone. The American duo Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson, for instance, fascinated thousands of young Westerners with their Surfer magazine dispatches throughout the 1970s.⁶⁹ Indeed, travel became, by that decade, an essential component of modern surf culture. “Just to clear something up,” the editors of Surfing magazine once wrote, “we’re not telling you to ‘travel.’ That’s a given. We surf; it’s assumed we’re all infected with the wanderlust. The allure of new waves and cultures comes with the territory, much like chronic tardiness and public displays of bro-shaking. We know you crave the road; we all do.”⁷⁰