Waikiki Dreams

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 "e;Doc"e; Ball, Preston "e;Pete"e; Peterson, Mary Ann Hawkins, and Lorrin "e;Whitey"e; 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.