Showcases surfing as a site of social belonging and power formation
The surf zone—the place between ocean and shore—offers a powerful space to reflect on the dynamic contemporary politics of our worlds. Surfing always occurs on Indigenous lands, and centering Indigeneity in surfing studies both recognizes this fundamental fact and creates a different starting point for connecting surfing, storytelling, power, and relationships. In Waves of Belonging, Lydia Heberling, David Kamper, and Jess Ponting gather essays by scholars and practitioners that grapple with power, identity, and belonging while remaining grounded in a sense of hope and futurity.
Contributors explore how Black, Indigenous, Latinx, queer and trans, and female-identifying communities transform surfing culture into possibilities for new imagined relations. The essays also interrogate the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic and twenty-first century racial protest movements as they manifest in surfing communities, geographies, and cultures across the world. Throughout the volume, surfing emerges as a method for decolonizing, righting historical wrongs, and restoring relationship with lands and waters and as a praxis for language learning.
Original and timely, Waves of Belonging challenges the histories of exclusivity associated with surfing and demonstrates how Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ people have drawn on surfing’s counterculture reputation to construct new spaces of hope and community.
Reviews
"[ E]nhances our understanding of the history of surfing, sometimes significantly." * The International Journal of the History of Sport *
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Showcases surfing as a site of social belonging and power formation
DRAFT"Introduction: Changing Tides and Shifting Swells Lydia
Heberling, David Kamper, and Jess Ponting
Section I: From Local to Global
1. "Hawaiians in the Olympics: Autonomy in Progress" Isaiah Walker
2. "Surfing and Surf-Canoeing in Atlantic Africa" Kevin Dawson
3. Surfscapes of Entitlement, Localisms of Resistance: Toward a Critical
Typology of Localisms in Occupied Surfing Territories Tara Ruttenberg and
Pete Brosious
4. Surfeminist Responses to the Violence of Global Authoritarianism
Krista Comer
Section II: Bo(a)rderlands
5. Aaniin nanda-gikendamaan (How I seek to learn it) Nicholas Reo
6. Reflection on Boarder X, a traveling exhibition; carving out paths to
decolonize galleries and laying claim for space to thrive Jaimie Isaac
7. Origin Stories of Radical: The Dogtown Imaginary and Inheritors of the
Z-Boy Revolution Chase Bucklew and David Kamper
8. The Code of the Sea: Race, Gender, and Belonging in Southern California
Surf Culture Cassie Comely
9. Surfing queer lines in public spaces: unlearning cishet-normativity as
radical pedagogy lisahunter
Section III: Intersections and Relations
10. Being Good Relatives: A Story of Indigenous and Settler Surfeminist
Collaboration and Legislated Land Acknowledgments Dina Gilio-Whitaker and
Krista Comer
11. "In the Name of Public Safety: Gendered Surveillance and Sexual Violence
Within Southern California Beach Lifeguarding Culture Asako Yonan
12. Totally Tubular Aesthetics: Surfing, Seafaring, and Storytelling in News
from Native California Lydia Heberling
13. This is Like a Renaissance: The Making of Surfings Oppositional
Culture in the Age of Black Lives Matter Elizabeth Sine
Lydia Heberling is assistant professor of ethnic studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. David Kamper is professor of American Indian studies at San Diego State University and author of The Work of Sovereignty: Labor Activism and Self-Determination at the Navajo Nation. Jess Ponting is associate professor and founder and director of the Center for Surf Research at San Diego State University. He is author of Sustainable Stoke: Transitions to Sustainability in the Surfing World.
