Shifting Currents: A World History of Swimming

(Hardback)

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Shifting Currents is an original and comprehensive history of swimming. It examines the tension that arose when non-swimming northerners met African and Southeast Asian swimmers. Using archaeological, textual, and art-historical sources, Karen Eva Carr shows how the water simultaneously attracted and repelled these northerners swimming seemed uncanny, related to witchcraft and sin. Europeans used Africans and Native Americans swimming skills to justify enslaving them, but northerners also wanted to claim waters power for themselves. They imagined that swimming would bring them health and demonstrate their scientific modernity. As Carr reveals, this unresolved tension still sexualises womens swimming and marginalises Black and Indigenous swimmers today. Thus, the history of swimming offers a new lens through which to gain a clearer view of race, gender, and power on a centuries-long scale.

'A fascinating story about swimmers and swimming across the world from antiquity to the present. In exploring the many ways that swimming has served as a marker of cultural and social difference, archaeologist and historian Carr has, in effect, produced a sweeping history of world civilisations from a new vantage point. Swimmers and non-swimmers alike will find much to enjoy in this learned, ambitious, and lively book.' Nigel Nicholson, Walter Mintz Professor of Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Humanities, Reed College

Reviews

"Shifting Currents is a must-have for anyone interested in human beings' long history of swimming. Guiding readers across human experience from the earliest times to the present, from Africa to Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australia, and Oceania (Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia), Carr provides swimming enthusiasts and scholars with a unique, rich, and engaging examination of swimming."--Kevin Dawson, associate professor of history, University of California, Merced, author of "Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora"
"The latest book to dive into the subject of swimming history, as interpreted by historians and journalists, is Shifting Currents, an incredibly well-researched and richly illustrated book. The things that separate Carr's book from the rest are her background as an expert in classical art and ancient archaeology and her use of art through the ages--from all inhabited continents--to help tell her story. And what a story!"-- "Swimming World"

Author Bio

Karen Eva Carr is Associate Professor (Emerita) in the Department of History at Portland State University, and her books include Vandals to Visigoths: Rural Settlement Patterns in Early Medieval Spain (2002).