TY - JOUR
AU1 - Demas,, Lane
AB - Do not overlook the term aquatic culture in the title of this wonderful book from Kevin Dawson. It describes many cultural activities of interest to a range of historians, including recreational swimming and surfing; bathing and water-based rituals; underwater diving for shellfish, sea turtles, and pearls; fishing; harpooning; canoeing and canoe building; shipwreck salvaging; and lifeguarding. Dawson deftly explores all of these topics in a series of swift, thematic chapters that move throughout the entire early modern Atlantic world (1444–1888). “Situating canoeing and swimming beneath a broad arc of time and space while examining them through an Atlantic lens,” he writes, “we can logically conclude that slaves recreated and reimagined African traditions in New World waterscapes” (p. 251). Dawson draws from leading Atlantic world scholarship, such as the work of W. Jeffrey Bolster, as well as scholars of Oceania—who use water to link, not divide, peoples and cultures. Undercurrents of Power explores an impressive range of archival material (and includes dozens of spectacular, pertinent images) to make a convincing case about the importance of waterscapes in the African diaspora. “Many Africans were fishing-farmers and farming-fishermen who wove terrestrial and aquatic experiences into amphibious lives,” Dawson argues, “interlacing spiritual and secular beliefs, economies, social structures, and political institutions—their very way of life—around relationships with water” (p. 2). Divided into two parts—swimming culture and canoe culture—the book spends substantial time tracing African canoeing to the New World, including separate chapters on the economic and cultural meanings of slave canoeing and its centrality to both formal exchange and the informal, internal slave economy. Noting how, in Africa, “canoes were the most expensive manufactured commodity in most societies,” Dawson asserts that African canoe building was not displaced by Amerindian practices but rather persisted, “enshrouded in secular and sacred cultural meanings that were not washed away by the waters of the Middle Passage or beaten from slaves by the taskmaster's whip” (pp. 109, 143). A final chapter even introduces readers to a genre of slave and free black work songs (dubbed “paddling songs”) that emerged among black canoemen (p. 222). The book also explores the culture of African free divers, such as the enslaved pearl divers whose skills earned honor, autonomy, and—at times—freedom. As Dawson writes, “African-influenced aquatic cultures provided enslaver and enslaved with benefits, locking them in symbiotic relationships” (p. 95). Undercurrents of Power gives other activities less attention but nevertheless analyzes them intriguingly. In just a few pages, Dawson challenges the popular history of surfing, uncovering indigenous surfing all along the West African coast. “Scholars generally believe the first account of surfing was written in Hawai'i in 1778,” he notes. “They are only a hundred and forty years too late, and some ten thousand miles off the mark” (p. 28). Throughout the book, Dawson elegantly highlights the theme of water as a path to slave resistance, escape, and freedom, challenging the “popular misconceptions” that black people “were averse to water and aquatic activities” (p. 6). In fact, he convincingly proves that whites were often more scared of the water, victims of their own “aquatic anxieties” (p. 7). In that vein, Undercurrents of Power is useful to historians of race in modern America and the twentieth-century civil rights movement, just as it is a valuable contribution to the history of the early African diaspora and Atlantic world. Maritime, environmental, and sport historians should be drawn to it as well. © The Author 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora
JF - The Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaz189
DA - 2019-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/undercurrents-of-power-aquatic-culture-in-the-african-diaspora-dr0Y982Yi2
SP - 154
VL - 106
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -