Shifting Currents : A World History of Swimming

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 water´s power for themselves. They imagined that swimming would bring them health and demonstrate their scientific modernity. This unresolved tension still sexualizes women´s swimming and marginalizes Black and Indigenous swimmers today. The history of swimming is a new lens through which to gain a clearer view of race, gender and power on a centuries-long scale.