New surfing: twenty-first century representations

In the late twentieth century, academic analyses increasingly challenged longstanding grand narratives of surfing pointing to smoothed evidence, tidied complexities and limited conceptualization, context and detail. Today, at the beginning of the second quarter of twenty-first century, academic analyses are highly alert to evidence and diverse surfing discourses and practices that in the identification of cultural heterogeneity expose tensions and contradictions as surfers of different ages, social classes, genders, sexualities, races and ethnicities compete for access to, and use of, surf breaks. They also recognize more complex relationships between physical surf breaks (including waves, underwater topography and water conditions) and surfing culture. In this article, I synthesize contemporary surfing literature based on the concept of critical representation which I argue distinguishes two broad streams. The first points to the emergence of rarely fixed and ever-changing meanings and representations grounded in anti-essentialist and contextualized epistemologies (about knowledge) that challenge cultural foundations and causal explanations, and view knowledge as situational and contextualized in the moment of its existence/representation/narration. The second stream recognizes that discursive analyses of surfing have failed to acknowledge and incorporate material conditions (e.g. bodies, physical environments and ecology) which, in an ontological sense (about being) exist independently of their representations. I explore the two streams through a closer examination of three themes: origins, sport and surf breaks/surfscapes. While my primary goal in synthesizing the literature is to highlight academic trends and directions in the surfing subfield which point to increasingly diverse and complex interpretations, I suggest that the broader lessons of critical representation apply in a more general sense to sports studies per se.