A Quarterly of Art and Culture Issue 56 Sports Us
c US $12 CANADA UK £7US $12 $12 ISSUE 56 A QUARTERLY OF ART AND CULTURE SPORTS 82 BEING THE WAVE Stefan Helmreich During the American presidential election of navigations, tracking how the aesthetics of 2008, close watchers of the news learned that the sublime—of individual union with scary phe- Barack Obama was a bodysurfer, riding waves nomena—have contoured risk-taking leisure.3 without aid of a board, propelled only by arms Krista Comer, in Surfer Girls in the New World Order, and swim-finned feet. The aim of the sport, writes reports on how women have struggled against their enthusiast Robert Gardner, “is to cut diagonally sidelining in surf culture, as successive genres of across the face of the wave, trying to slide along just surfer masculinity—strapping, slacking—have under the breaking curl. This increases the speed of claimed social space.4 Racial politics have shaped the ride.”1 Bodysurfing lacks the glamour of board the sport too. Comer tells the tale of Native surfing, or anything like its promotional indus- Hawaiian surfer Eddie Aikau, who traveled to try. It is a solitary and spare enterprise, requiring apartheid-era South Africa with haoles (who, like a feel for how to launch one’s body across the arc him, had been inspired by the 1966 movie The of a breaking wave. Obama arrived at the activity Endless Summer), only to be turned away from a biographically, growing up as he did in Hawai‘i. segregated hotel—an affront his white friends A first-generation African American, Obama was did nothing to address, and which then racialized not, like his University-of-Hawai‘i-anthropology- existing ethnic divides when the group returned graduate-student mother, Ann Dunham, a to Hawai‘i.
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