Shifting currents : a world history of swimming / Karen Eva Carr.
Publisher: London : Reaktion Books, 2022Description: 455 pages, 16 pages of plates : illustrations (black and white, and colour) ; 24 cmISBN:- 9781789145786 (hbk.) :
- 23 797.2109
Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Loanable Book | Library | General Collection | 797.2109 CAR (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 000436513 |
"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." - Book cover
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