Capturing Kahanamoku: How a Surfing Legend and a Scientific Obsession Redefined Race and Culture

In this strange and captivating account, science historian Rossi (The Republic of Color) revisits the 1920s eugenicist obsession with groundbreaking Olympic swimmer and surfer Duke Kahanamoku and his native Hawaii. Opening with a tense and symbolic scene of Duke’s brother David Kahanamoku’s “fight for survival” as he was entombed in a full-body plaster cast by a team of visiting eugenicists, the book balances several intersecting narratives at once: the increasing American mainland influence in Hawaii; Duke’s rise as a star athlete, which spearheaded the revitalization of Hawaiian surfing; and the arrival of “race scientists” on Hawaii’s shores aspiring to “study the effects of ‘race mixing.’ ” For these eugenicists, Hawaii was “part laboratory and part time machine,” an example of a formerly thriving society now suffering multiracial-driven deterioration (with a twist the eugenicists had trouble reconciling—that Hawaii’s multicultural society “functioned more or less harmoniously”). Rossi excels at exposing the bunk pseudoscience (“somewhere between surrealism and a conspiracy theory”) at the heart of eugenicists’ mystical fascination with race. The book loses some steam when it shifts focus to Duke’s later move to Los Angeles, and Rossi’s concluding attribution of the mid-20th-century explosion of California’s surf culture to a former eugenicist’s turn from race mysticism to cultural studies feels somewhat tenuous. Still, readers will find this a fascinating look at the painful intersection of Hawaiian and sports history with an ignominious branch of science. (Oct.)