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. As Carr reveals, this unresolved tension still sexualises women’s 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