U.S. Army in Honduras, “but we are trying to modernize and stabilize the situation at hand.”8
The case of Rafael Lima is certainly unusual. Most surfers were not involved in training the paramilitaries or death squads of Latin America. Most, in fact, paid them little heed. The Lima account does, however, starkly reveal the ways that surfers, as people and as tourists, inevitably maneuvered through an inherently political world. Surfing is of course ultimately about plea sure. People ride waves because it is fun. Gliding across the face of a moving mass of water, turning offthe top of a folding lip, tucking into a barrel: these feel good, so much so that surfers oft en speak of the wave-riding experience as something akin to a spiritual quest. Yet plea sure, like “the personal” once highlighted by the women’s movement, is political. We must thus come to appreciate surfing in political terms. Although surfing may involve a specific person riding a specific wave at a specific beach, those waves travel vast distances, just like the surfers who set out across the planet to ride them. Surfing, in other words, is a natural global phenomenon, and it enjoys a rich and complex global history. It is the goal of Empire in Waves to tease from this history some of the politics inherent to the enduring quest for aquatic pleasure.
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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.
If surfing had become thoroughly Americanized by the first few decades of the twentieth century—though always, as Isaiah Helekunihi Walker has shown, in the context of ongoing resistance from the Hawaiian people—Americans increasingly sought to make it global.9 Ironically enough, it was two Hawaiian men, the legendary lifeguard George Freeth and the five-time Olympic medalist Duke Kahanamoku, who perhaps most famously helped plant the roots of global surf culture. But they were not alone. By the 1950s and 1960s, thriving communities of surfers could be found not only in the United States but in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, France, and Great Britain. Surfing, moreover, entered the commercial and political mainstream. Hollywood developed a fascination with Southern California beach culture, churning out such motion pictures as the Gidget series and the popular comedies of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, while those charged with crafting U.S. foreign policy gave the surfing lifestyle a bit part in official Cold War cultural diplomacy.
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.
Whether they liked it or not, however, surfers—mostly young Westerners who routinely traveled where few other foreign tourists bothered to visit—inevitably found themselves enmeshed in the practical realities of U.S. foreign policy. This is perhaps truer of no place more than Indonesia, the vast archipelago north of Australia considered the premier surfing destination on the planet. What had, in the 1950s, been a leading Third World proponent of nonalignment in the broader Cold War struggle became, by the late 1960s, a staunch American ally in Washington’s ideological competition with China and the Soviet Union. It was in 1965 and 1966 that Indonesia’s neutralist Sukarno government was essentially overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup that culminated in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. In the decades that followed, Indonesia stood out as a leading recipient of U.S. military aid and diplomatic support, whether in Jakarta’s brutal and consistent repression of internal dissent or in its 1975 invasion and genocidal occupation of East Timor. As chapter 3 examines, it was shortly after the massacres of the mid-1960s that Indonesia began to capture the attention of American and Australian surfers, who discovered on its thousands of islands some of the finest waves in the world. With the cooperation of the Suharto regime, which boosted international surfing contests and even sponsored an outer-island junket for visiting foreigners, surfers helped promote tourism across the island chain. Surfing magazines regularly published features on Indonesian “surfaris,” while filmmakers captured the nation’s waves and people in a host of productions. In such features, whether print or filmic, the nation was represented not as a site of dictatorship and state repression—which was how too many Indonesians experienced life in their country—but as an exotic paradise with primitive locals who welcomed the West’s interest in their homeland. Empire in Waves examines both this discursive erasure and surfers’ collaboration with the Indonesian authorities, illustrating how the touristic impulse that is virtually intrinsic to the sport of surfing has inevitably been imbued with political meaning.
Just as Indonesian repression was written out of surfing’s popular grand narrative, so, too, was South African apartheid. For over two decades after The Endless Summer featured what it called the “perfect waves” of South Africa’s Cape St. Francis as the film’s apotheosis of surf travel (with, it must be noted, nary a word about the country’s notorious system of racial segregation), young Americans and Australians ventured to the apartheid state to enjoy its rich coastal bounty. Nearly all of these young tourists were white; surfers of color who traveled to South Africa, such as the Hawaiian professionals Dane Kealoha and Eddie Aikau, were denied entry into restaurants or hotels and were technically
