Overview

Surfing today evokes many things: thundering waves, warm beaches, bikinis and lifeguards, and carefree pleasure. But is the story of surfing really as simple as popular culture suggests? In this first international political history of the sport, Scott Laderman shows that while wave riding is indeed capable of stimulating tremendous pleasure, its globalization went hand in hand with the blood and repression of the long twentieth century. Emerging as an imperial instrument in post-annexation Hawaii, spawning a form of tourism that conquered the littoral Third World, tracing the struggle against South African apartheid, and employed as a diplomatic weapon in America's Cold War arsenal, the saga of modern surfing is only partially captured by Gidget, the Beach Boys, and the film Blue Crush. From nineteenth-century American empire-building in the Pacific to the low-wage labor of the surf industry today, Laderman argues that surfing in fact closely mirrored American foreign relations. Yet despite its less-than-golden past, the sport continues to captivate people worldwide. Whether in El Salvador or Indonesia or points between, the modern history of this cherished pastime is hardly an uncomplicated story of beachside bliss. Sometimes messy, occasionally contentious, but never dull, surfing offers us a whole new way of viewing our globalized world.

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What Laderman presents is a fascinating account of a sport whose proponents believed it to be apolitical, but facing the politics of a modern world. H-Net 20150115 Laderman's history offers intriguing moments in which he pulls together surfing narratives of soldiers and other state agents- illustrating the degree to which pleasure and power were intimately linked in the world that American foreign policy produced. -- Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez The Journal of American History 20150301 An authoritative account of the intersection of politics and surfing. -- Brian Unger The Surfer's Journal 20150401

Author Information

Scott Laderman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and the author of Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory.

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