Shifting Currents

“Swimming” can encompass a wide variety of physical activities aside from the standardized lap-swimming competitions we see featuring the likes of Katie Ledecky and Adam Peaty. It can mean wading at the beach; lounging at the town pool; playing games in the pond or stream near your house; military maneuvers like boarding a vessel; lifesaving practices; doing water aerobics or other exercises; free or scuba diving; religious practices; or diving for treasure, artifacts, or food, and so forth. As such, any “world history” of the activity will be long and broad.Drawing on a wide range of secondary and primary sources from centuries ago up until now, Karen Eva Carr's Shifting Currents: A World History attempts to trace the “story of how and why” people have learned to swim, forgotten to swim, and learned and forgotten again—and how these forgettings and rememberings inform meanings of race. Over the course of her research, Carr states that she came to understand the project as also “a way of making Whiteness visible, or strange, of learning to study Whiteness, and White culture without normalizing it as neutral” (9). This is a laudable and worthy goal, and I think Carr is more successful than not, but her lack of more explicit engagement with the scholarship of critical sport historians and critical whiteness scholars weakens an otherwise very solid broad history of swimming.Carr organizes her book into four parts representing the linear movements of people across the world: swimming, then people forgetting to swim, then they learn to swim again, and then the contemporary moment where, she argues, we are all swimming less. She argues that most humans swam until the Ice Age, when swimming became less widespread. As a result, swimmer/nonswimmer categories were geographically differentiated (first North and South, then East and West) and then became a cultural signifier. For instance, ancient Greeks used the ability to swim as one way to differentiate themselves from the Persians, and “medieval China found unity as a swimming culture in opposition to Central Asian non-swimmers from still further north” (128). Carr then proceeds to argue that these cultural signifiers became race-based as empire and colonialization expanded, especially with Europeans’ exploitative expansion into Africa and the Americas.This aspect of her argument, which really begins in part 3 and continues into part 4, could be a fascinating and important contribution to sport history. Carr utilizes Dawson's work on African aquatic culture and the ways Europeans exploited its skills and abilities. She also discusses swimming's role in the exploitation and Othering of Indigenous people in the Americas. However, she does not engage enough with sport historians or racial formation theories. In her failure to do so, her analysis of her sources is often acritical and reductive. For example, she claims that “Europeans’ disinclination to swim may have been strengthened by a desire to dissociate themselves from their enslaved victims” (180) and continues in the following pages with some great evidence for this claim while also offering evidence of the use of swimming to separate white Europeans (“civilized”) from non-white Indigenous Others (“non-civilized”). But she never explicitly (or implicitly, based on the notes) applies theories of race to sharpen her analysis. In another example, she seems to claim that contemporary Indigenous people are “trying to be white” by “promot[ing] European-style swimming as a way to regain lost power” (349–50). Furthermore, she rarely grapples with the ramifications of colonizing people's imposition of their meanings of a physical activity onto the people they seek to exploit—or the ramifications of a twenty-first-century scholar categorizing everything from religious water rituals to aquatic sexual fantasies in literature to important life skills all neatly under the umbrella term of “swimming.” Further engagement with sport studies scholarship would have improved her analysis throughout by allowing her to go beyond the interpretations and analysis she offers here.Her meticulous cataloging of all the different ways that swimming—or what might be better called “aquatic physical culture,” because she never really, to my mind, grapples with the implications of the many different meanings that “swimming” can have—was and is a part of human cultures around the world is invaluable to any scholar interested in swimming or any other human aquatic activities. However, despite her interesting insights and findings, her lack of explicit engagement with theoretical and conceptual works on critical whiteness, racial formation theories, and critical sport historiography renders her project less convincing than I had hoped it could be. On the other hand, with that important caveat, this book should find space on any swimming scholar's shelf, just below Jeff Wiltse's important Contested Waters and Kevin Dawson's masterful Undercurrents of Power

Current (fluid · Geology · History · Oceanography · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Sports, Gender, and Society

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