Waves of Belonging

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.

"The geographic, methodological, and theoretical diversity in this volume redirects our attention from the dominant image of the white male surfer toward the Indigenous roots and routes of this ancient practice."—Hōkūlani K. Aikau, coeditor of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai'i

"Waves of Belonging forefronts Indigenous voices, acknowledges fraught histories and presents of settler colonialism, and encourages a politics of ethical relationality. A must-read for those in critical surf studies and surf activism circles!"—Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, author of Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine

"Demonstrates how surfing can be understood beyond superficial images of lifestyle sport to encompass critically important forces working today toward justice and political recognition."—Patrick Moser, author of Waikīkī Dreams: How California Appropriated Hawaiian Beach Culture