Shifting Currents
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€31.99
A01=Karen Eva Carr
africa
african
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
analysis
aquatic
aquatics
archaeological
art
artwork
Author_Karen Eva Carr
automatic-update
Bathing
Beaches
bias
black
Breaststroke
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=SCX
Category=SPCS
Category=WSBX
Category=WSSC
contemporary
controversial
controversies
COP=United Kingdom
critique
debate
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
Drowning
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_sports-fitness
Format=BB
Format_Hardback
gender
global
history of swimming
hobby
Ice Age
indigenous
international
Language_English
literature
marginalization
marginalized
modern
Native Americans
northern
PA=Available
power
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
race
racism
sexism
softlaunch
southeast asia
sport
superstition
tension
text
textual
water
Witchcraft
women
Product details
- ISBN 9781789145786
- Format: Hardback
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 16 May 2022
- Publisher: Reaktion Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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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 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.
Karen Eva Carr is Associate Professor (Emerita) in the Department of History at Portland State University, and is the author of Vandals to Visigoths: Rural Settlement Patterns in Early Medieval Spain (2002).
