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Waikiki Dreams

How California Appropriated Hawaiian Beach Culture
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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 Waikiki 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, Waikiki Dreams opens up the origins of a defining California subculture.
Patrick Moser is professor of writing and French at Drury University. He is the author of Surf and Rescue: George Freeth and the Birth of California Beach Culture and the editor of Pacific Passages: An Anthology of Surf Writing.
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
"Moser challenges conventional surf historiography in ways that are desperately needed. Mainstream surf narratives frequently point out the influence of Native Hawaiian culture on California surf culture, but typically without critical analysis. Moser upends these narratives by bringing in Indigenous scholarly perspectives to explain the dynamics of cultural appropriation in a refreshingly updated approach."--Dina Gilio-Whitaker, author of As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock
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