Shifting Currents: A World History of Swimming

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.

"An original and comprehensive history of swimming... A new lens through which to gain a clearer view of race, gender, and power." Outdoor Swimmer

"Shifting Currents is a must-have for anyone interested in human beings’ long history of swimming. Guiding readers across human experience from the earliest times to the present, from Africa to Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australia, and Oceania (Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia), Carr provides swimming enthusiasts and scholars with a unique, rich, and engaging examination of swimming." Kevin Dawson, associate professor of history, University of California, Merced, author of Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora

Karen Eva Carr is associate professor emerita in the Department of History at Portland State University. Her books include Vandals to Visigoths: Rural Settlement Patterns in Early Medieval Spain.