Introduction: Waterscapes of the African Diaspora
PART I. SWIMMING CULTURE
Chapter 1. Atlantic African Aquatic Cultures: A Cross-Cultural
Comparison
Chapter 2. Cultural Meanings of Recreational Swimming and
Surfing
Chapter 3. Aquatic Sports and Performance Rituals: Gender, Bravery,
and Honor
Chapter 4. History from Below: Enslaved Underwater Divers
Chapter 5. Undercurrents of Power: Challenging Racial Hierarchies
from Below
PART II. CANOE CULTURE
Chapter 6. African Canoe-Makers: Constructing Floating Cultures
Chapter 7. Mountains Divide and Rivers Unite: Atlantic African
Canoemen
Chapter 8. Maritime Continuities: African Canoes on New World
Waters
Chapter 9. The Floating Economies of Slaves and Slaveholders
Chapter 10. Sacred Vessels, Sacred Waters: The Cultural Meanings of
Dugout Canoes
Chapter 11. A World Afloat: Mobile Slave Communities
Chapter 12. The Watermen's Song: Canoemen's Aural Waterscapes
Conclusion. A Sea Change in Atlantic History
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Kevin Dawson considers how enslaved Africans carried aquatic skills—swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing—to the Americas. 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.
Kevin Dawson is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Merced.
"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*
"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*
"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*
"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*
"Undercurrents of Power is a significant intervention into the
fields of Early Vast America, African Diaspora, African American,
and Caribbean histories. By focusing on African aquatic cultural
and material contributions, Dawson rescues African maritime
narratives in the early Atlantic World, which have been grossly
ignored or silenced. It is a must-read for scholars and graduate
students in these respective fields. The prose is captivating and
clear."
*Journal of Early American 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*
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