Shifting Currents

Product information

€36.25

Stock: In Stock Online

Our USPs

free delivery icon
Free Delivery
Extended Range: Delivery 3-4 working days
dubray rewards icon
Dubray Rewards
Earn 145 Reward Points on this title

Shifting Currents

Product information

Author: Karen Eva Carr

Type: Hardback

ISBN: 9781789145786

Date: 16th May, 2022

Publisher: REAKTION BOOKS

  1. Categories

  2. Swimming And Diving

Description

A deep dive into the history of aquatics that exposes centuries-old tensions of race, gender, and power at the root of many contemporary swimming controversies.   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. As Carr reveals, this unresolved tension still sexualizes women's swimming and marginalizes 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.

Additional details