Seven (1 + 6) surfing stories: the practice of authoring

Abstract

‘History’, Alun Munslow (2010, 148) reminds us, ‘is primarily an authoring activity’. In this article I discuss authoring as a practice in which historians with their political, ideological and ethical dispositions and beliefs mobilize and translate evidence from the past and create narratives, that is, constitute the past as history. My particular interest in authoring concerns the choices historians make around epistemology, content, context, argument, politics and ethics. As the title reveals, I use surfing as a subject matter to illustrate the practice of authoring. The article comprises seven stories: ‘Indicators’, ‘Angourie’, ‘Llandudno’, ‘Beach break’, ‘Jeffreys Bay’, ‘Cazane’ and ‘Burleigh Heads’. (The titles are renowned surf breaks, waterscapes, where material and affective bodies interact with the surf and each other, and sites of experiences which drive the stories.) In ‘Indicators’, I introduce myself as an author and surfer; I mediate the remaining stories, which were told by other surfers. From each story (or pair of stories in the case of Beach break and Jeffreys Bay) I extract a notion(s) – subjectivity, emancipation, affective experiences, intentions and ethics, traces and ‘resolutions’ – for analysis. Inserted into what Munslow (2007, 144) calls the ‘story space’ – ‘the author-historian’s fictively constituted narrative model of when, why, how, what and to whom things happened’ – of constructionism, the dominant genre of sport history, these notions reveal sophisticated, theoretically rich and well supported (i.e. referenced) explanations. But when interrogated as choices, these notions reappear as authorial intellectual, emotional and ethical mediations.