Early Modern Americas #: Undercurrents of Power

Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora

Early Modern Americas #: Undercurrents of Power
Kevin Dawson
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NZ$ 69.99
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NZ$ 55.99
Paperback
h229 x 152mm - 360pg
7 May 2021 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9780812224931
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Long before the rise of New World slavery, West Africans were adept swimmers, divers, canoe makers, and canoeists. They lived along riverbanks, near lakes, or close to the ocean. In those waterways, they became proficient in diverse maritime skills, while incorporating water and aquatics into spiritual understandings of the world. Transported to the Americas, slaves carried with them these West African skills and cultural values. Indeed, according to Kevin Dawson' s examination of water culture in the African diaspora, the aquatic abilities of people of African descent often surpassed those of Europeans and their descendants from the age of discovery until well into the nineteenth century. As Dawson argues, histories of slavery have largely chronicled the fields of the New World, whether tobacco, sugar, indigo, rice, or cotton. However, most plantations were located near waterways to facilitate the transportation of goods to market, and large numbers of agricultural slaves had ready access to water in which to sustain their abilities and interests. Swimming and canoeing provided respite from the monotony of agricultural bondage and brief moments of bodily privacy. In some instances, enslaved laborers exchanged their aquatic expertise for unique privileges, including wages, opportunities to work free of direct white supervision, and even in rare circumstances, freedom. Dawson builds his analysis around a discussion of African traditions and the ways in which similar traditions-swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing-emerged within African diasporic communities. Undercurrents of Power not only chronicles the experiences of enslaved maritime workers, but also traverses the waters of the Atlantic repeatedly to trace and untangle cultural and social traditions.

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Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora

"Kevin Dawson' s masterly synthesis goes beyond filling a gap in maritime history: it reconfirms and expands a discourse on maritime traditions of Africans at home and abroad, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. "-The International Journal of Maritime History "Kevin Dawson' s Undercurrents of Power is important. More than perhaps any study in recent memory, it brings the existence, value, and meaning of water in the African diaspora to the forefront of Atlantic cultural, social, and economic development. In a broad,sweeping narrative, Dawson covers remarkable ground, crisscrossing the Atlantic as he draws together hundreds of examples of how water defined the pre-slavery lives of Africans forced into the Atlantic slave trade and how it helped diverse peoples and cultures identify themselves, individually and collectively, in the whirlwind and trauma of enslavement. The work explores the complexities of honor, warfare, social status, youth, sex, technology, and leisure and how each interacted with, and indeed structured itself around, water and aquatic spaces. "-The Journal of Southern History "Kevin Dawson offers the remarkable untold history of the significance of aquatic culture in the African diaspora. Undercurrents of Power opens up a new and exciting aspect of slaves' experience, providing a crucially important piece of the history of slave life and labor in the Americas. "-James Sidbury, Rice University "This is an important book in a number of ways. It displays the ways many enslaved Africans used the knowledge they brought with them to expand the space available to them. It gives us a picture of how aspects of slavery in one of the most coercive slave societies ever created were negotiated. It is also a contribution to aquatic history and culture informed by Kevin Dawson' s passion for and understanding of aquatic life. In making his arguments, Dawson uses a wide range of sources and uses them well. Most important, he gives us a picture of those enslaved as agents, who used their knowledge and their skills to push the boundaries of their enslavement. "-Early American Literature "Stunning . . . Undercurrents of Power brings to light the various aquatic traditions of Africans and Diasporans working, cultivating, and negotiating the riparian, oceanic, lake, and swamp biomes both in the context of Africa and in the environments they encountered throughout the Atlantic and into the Americas . . . In the process of opening various kinds of waterscapes to historical analysis, Dawson fundamentally reimagines the cultural dynamics shaping the Americas. "-Black Perspectives
Kevin Dawson is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Merced.
Status: No local stock, title imported to order
ISBN-13: 9780812224931
Published: 7 May 2021
Published In: United States
Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 229mm
Width: 152mm
Pages: 360

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