Event

“Songs, Surfing, and Postcolonial Sustainability”
Room 266, Everson Hall

Tim Cooley is Professor of Ethnomusicology and Global and International Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His most recent book is Surfing about Music (University of California Press, 2014) in which he discusses the relationships between surfing and music. In the book he covers the popularity of surfing popularized by rock groups such as the Beach Boys, Dick Dale and the Del Tones. He also explores the role of surfing in Hawaiian society, its mele (chants) and hula (dance or visual poetry). Cooley’s research and interests include folk music—from Hawai‘i to Eastern Europe—to American popular music, and also theories of ethnicity, nationalism, globalization, and tourism. He is also the author of Making Music in the Polish Tatras (2005) and coeditor (with Gregory Barz) of the groundbreaking Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (2008). Cooley received his PhD in ethnomusicology from Brown University, his master’s degree from Northwestern, and his bachelor’s degree from Wheaton Conservatory of Music.

This talk asks if efforts to decolonize ethnomusicology (and ourselves) might benefit from engaging emerging ecomusicology. Colonialism exploits both environmental resources and human beings together with their cultural practices. Meaningful decolonization will restructure and heal cross-cultural human interactions as well as human engagement with our environment. Thus decolonizing our discipline becomes a holistic effort that interprets and advocates for sustainable cultural practices grounded in ecology.

These ideas are explored through Cooley’s research of music associated with surfing. Surfing as an integrated cultural practice was most highly developed on the islands of Hawai‘i, and the spread of surfing globally was part of the U.S. colonization of Hawai‘i. Resultant changes in surfing as a cultural practice are marked musically. In pre-contact Hawai‘i, mele (chants) affirmed surfing as an expression of establishment (royal) power. Immediately following the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, perennially popular hapa haole (“half foreign” tin pan alley-style) songs reinterpreted surfing as a local attraction that white men might learn from Hawaiian women. Then in the early 1960s newly branded “surf music” marked a sea change for the sport, shifting the cultural center of surfing from Hawai‘i to southern California and redefining it as hyper-masculine, white, middle-class, and expressive of youth-culture and consumerism. Thus this “unabashed celebration of consumption” (Garofalo 2008: 154) was also an anthem for the colonial appropriation of Hawaiian cultural practices. More recent musicking associated with surfing promotes global environmental activism, though it does not take into account the surfing industry’s involvement in colonialism and ongoing ecological disruption.

Free (Sponsored by the William E. Valente Endowment)

Everson Hall, Davis, CA

View all UCD Arts departments and programs

Melody Chiang

Art
History

Melody Chiang

Art
Studio

Melody Chiang

Cinema and Digital Media

Melody Chiang

Design

Melody Chiang

Music

Melody Chiang

Theatre
and Dance

Melody Chiang

Performance Studies

Melody Chiang

Mondavi
Center

Melody Chiang

ARTS ADMINISTRATIVE GROUP

Melody Chiang

Home:
UC Davis Arts