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  • Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora by Kevin Dawson
  • Tessa Murphy (bio)
Keywords

Africa, Atlantic Ocean, waterscapes, sea, coasts, swimming, canoes, slavery, watercraft

Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora. By Kevin Dawson. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 351. Cloth, $45.00.)

Although early modern Europeans used the Atlantic Ocean as a conduit for expanding their territorial, economic, and racial domination, most continued to view bodies of water as dangerous spaces to be avoided whenever possible. In his provocative book, Kevin Dawson argues that Western perceptions of "waterways as empty, cultureless, historical voids" (1) continue to limit historical examinations of aquatic spaces. Building on scholarship that explores the role of geography in shaping human experience, Dawson situates "waterscapes"—coasts, lakes, and rivers on both sides of the Atlantic—as key sites for the creation and recreation of African cultures and identities. Using work on Oceania as a model for privileging how members of the African diaspora understood and related to aquatic environments, Undercurrents of Power offers an exciting new paradigm for exploring Afro–Atlantic history.

The book is divided into two parts, with the first five chapters organized around the theme of swimming culture and the next seven chapters exploring canoe culture. In Part I, Dawson stresses the ubiquity of bathing, swimming, diving, surfing, and aquatic sports such as alligator fighting in Atlantic Africa. Mining European accounts of slavery in mainland North America, the Caribbean, and South America's Pearl Coast, Dawson argues that captives carried these widespread aquatic practices with them to the Americas, where they instructed their country-born descendants in swimming and diving techniques that remained largely [End Page 125] elusive to Europeans. Of particular interest are the consequences of divergent African and European attitudes toward water. Dawson argues that European views of water as "an unnatural space for humans" allowed members of the African diaspora to "physically and intellectually colonize these spaces" (143). Recasting maritime environments as arenas of African control, or at least ones in which European domination was less strongly felt, Dawson emphasizes how simple acts such as bathing facilitated African and Afro American socialization and the development of shared cultural meanings.

The seven chapters organized around the theme of canoe culture consider both the practical and the symbolic purposes of watercraft. Tracing the construction and use of canoes in both salt- and freshwater environments throughout the Atlantic world, Dawson characterizes African dugouts as mobile sites for the transmission of navigational, economic, and spiritual practices. The forced encounter between Africans from different coastal and riverine ethnic groups in the Americas "transformed canoes into creolizing constructs," (221) as captives replicated and exchanged techniques for sourcing, building, and piloting their wooden vessels. By extending scholarship on the development of African American culture to include waterscapes, Dawson persuasively demonstrates how canoes blurred cultural and linguistic boundaries, contributed to informal economies, and provided spaces for socialization away from the watchful eyes of Europeans.

The written sources on which Dawson draws span from 1445, when Portuguese sailors first documented their attempt to capture fisherman off the coast of Senegal, until as late as 1929, and include English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian, and even Latin accounts. Mining ships' logs, travel and slave narratives, and newspapers for any and all mention of African or Afro-descended people engaging with water, Dawson re-reads predominantly European sources in a way that succeeds in privileging African perspectives and experiences. As he acknowledges, the episodic nature of these accounts favors the development of a thematic rather than a chronological approach, limiting his ability to chart trans-Atlantic transmissions in a clear linear fashion. Yet, by highlighting striking similarities across time and space, Dawson convincingly identifies the common origins of African aquatic practices, as well as their continued recreation in diaspora.

In addition to the wealth of written material on which Dawson draws, his nuanced analysis of visual and aural sources generates a truly novel [End Page 126] and multi-faceted exploration of the aquatic cultures of the African diaspora. European and American sketches of swimming, boating, and diving are used to great effect throughout the book, as Dawson re-interprets images such as a sixteenth...

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