surfers decided to adhere to the sporting boycott called for by the global antiapartheid movement by forgoing international surfing contests in South Africa. The boycott movement generated considerable debate in the surfing community. Among South Africa’s white minority were some of the most accomplished surfers in the world, and the nation’s beaches had become globally famous for the superior quality of their waves. Nevertheless, to the boycott’s proponents, forgoing participation in the South African leg of the surfing world tour was a morally necessary step in opposing racial oppression. The boycott’s opponents, however, viewed such actions as an ill-advised politicization of what they considered an apolitical sport. Chapter 4 examines this historical epoch—a three-decade saga that culminated in surfing’s discovery that it was not in fact above international politics—situating the debate over apartheid in the surfing community within the broader context of modern sport and global affairs.
Recognizing the confluence of politics and economic policy, Empire in Waves likewise explores the development of commercial surf culture and its relationship to global neoliberalism. What began as small outfits founded by surfers looking for ways to subsidize their wave-riding lifestyle had become, by the 1980s and 1990s, billion-dollar corporations with a retail presence throughout the industrialized world. Clothing brands such as Quiksilver, Billabong, and Rip Curl were increasingly found not only in traditional surf communities but also in inland malls from Topeka to Kuala Lumpur. By the close of the twentieth century, surf culture had indeed gone global. With billions of dollars at stake, it is little surprise that “non-endemic” corporations would seek to tap the surf market, and, by the early twenty-first century, the “organics” faced growing competition from Nike, Target, and—perhaps most bizarrely of all—the Abercrombie & Fitch subsidiary Hollister. Yet unexplored by scholars has been the extent to which the manufacture and assembly of surfwear products has been enabled by the neoliberal trade policies pursued by the United States and its industrial allies. In particular, the so-called “race to the bottom” that has mixed a minimal standard of environmental regulation with an abundant supply of low-wage workers has been at the heart of American efforts to promote “free trade.” Clothing and apparel manufacturers have benefited enormously from this situation.
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.
ONE
How Surfing Became American
THE IMPERIAL ROOTS OF MODERN SURF CULTURE
WHEN NATHANIEL B. EMERSON, the outgoing president of the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society, stood before an assembly of the organization in July 1892, he was full of praise for his missionary predecessors who had worked tirelessly to uplift the “infant race” populating “that fragment” of the Polynesian islands he now called home. Having overseen the “birth of a [Christian] nation,” it had devolved upon this earlier generation of missionaries, Emerson maintained, “to swathe the tender limbs of the newborn, to counsel as to the nutriment suited to its earliest needs, to direct its first tottering footsteps, to give it the alphabet of learning, to initiate for it such intellectual, moral[,] and religious tuition as becomes a candidate for admission into the fraternity of nations.” This was, to be sure, “a task beset with difficulties, imposing large responsibilities, and demanding great earnestness, devotion, and practical wisdom.” But, Emerson assured his audience, “success” had been “attained.”1 Christian civilization had taken root in the Hawaiian archipelago.
Emerson was speaking before the congregated guests not to celebrate this heavenly victory, however. His immediate concern was of a much more worldly nature. He took to the podium that July day to defend his missionary predecessors—many of them the fathers and mothers of those assembled in the room—from charges that they had engineered the demise of a number of “noble” Hawaiian sports. The “children of nature” whom the proselytizers saw as their charges had developed a number of pastimes “worthy of perpetuation,” Emerson believed. The fitness of “surf riding” and other activities to “develope [sic] and invigorate the frame and to impart and maintain a virile courage and endurance” was one, the outgoing president insisted, that “should be cultivated in every race.”2 Emerson was certainly right about surfing’s invigorating qualities. But, to Hawaiians, it was about much more. From the selection of a tree out of which a board might be shaped to the interactions of the wave riders and spectators, surfing, which involved all strata of society—young and old, commoners and royalty, men and women—represented a ritualized set of practices at the core of what it meant to be Hawaiian. How shamefully misguided, therefore, that certain critics had seen fit to blame the missionaries for the decline of surfing and other sports, Emerson continued. He, for one, would have none of it. His predecessors “exercised no direct or appreciable influence” in “the death and retirement of Hawaii’s ancient sports and games,” he assured the audience. On the contrary, “they were utterly powerless to arrest the tendency towards the substitution of imported and foreign games for the worthy sports and exercises indigenous to the soil and race.”3 The Hawaiian people, that is, had collectively chosen to no longer indulge their traditional pursuits. It was their choice. Prohibitions had not been imposed on them.
But Emerson’s tutorial—in essence, that Hawaiians simply lost interest in a number of cultural activities as the annual Makahiki festival was discontinued, the kapu system was abolished, foreign games were introduced, and people’s focus increasingly turned to war making—is much too exculpatory and self-serving.4 He and his missionary predecessors bore no responsibility for the destruction of traditional Hawaiian culture,
