Full Description
Despite a genuine admiration for Native Hawaiian culture, white Californians of the 1930s ignored authentic relationships with Native Hawaiians. Surfing became a central part of what emerged instead: a beach culture of dressing, dancing, and acting like an Indigenous people whites idealized.
Patrick Moser uses surfing to open a door on the cultural appropriation practiced by Depression-era Californians against a backdrop of settler colonialism and white nationalism. Recreating the imagined leisure and romance of life in Waikīkī attracted people buffeted by economic crisis and dislocation. California-manufactured objects like surfboards became a physical manifestation of a dream that, for all its charms, emerged from a white impulse to both remove and replace Indigenous peoples. Moser traces the rise of beach culture through the lives of trendsetters Tom Blake, John "Doc" Ball, Preston "Pete" Peterson, Mary Ann Hawkins, and Lorrin "Whitey" Harrison while also delving into California's control over images of Native Hawaiians via movies, tourism, and the surfboard industry.
Compelling and innovative, Waikīkī Dreams opens up the origins of a defining California subculture.
Contents
Acknowledgements
A Note on Hawaiian Language
Introduction
Prologue: California Beach Culture in the 1920s--The Decade of Duke
Part I. The Builders
The Dreamer
The Photographer
The Waterman
The Waterwoman
The Traveler
Part II. The Beaches
Palos Verdes
San Onofre
Malibu
Part III. The Dream
Hawaiian Surfboard and the Writing of Surf History
Epilogue: California Beach Culture during World War II Notes
Bibliography
Index
