Hardback / bound
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English
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Description
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
Kevin Dawson is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Merced.