Waterscapes and wet bodies: Beach culture in Atlantic Africa and the diaspora, 1444-1888

Abstract

Waterscapes and Wet Bodies: Beach Culture in Atlantic Africa and the Diaspora, 1444-1888 considers how Atlantic Africans constructed social, cultural, and spiritual relationships with waterscapes. John Gillis’s historical analyses of human relationships with oceanic coastlines creating, what he called, “human shores” helps us consider how Atlantic Africans perceived and interacted with Atlantic shorelines, as well as shores along rivers and lakes. Believing water was a sacred and secular space, Africans created human shores along saltwater, freshwater, and brackish waterways where they forged enduring connections with waterscapes, a term signifying how water and adjacent lands were seamlessly merged into unifying culturescapes. Africans developed emersionary aquatic traditions—including swimming, underwater diving, surfing, canoeing, and fishing—that inspired and required them to interact with water on a daily basis. Enslaved Africans recreated and reimagined African beliefs about water and aquatic traditions throughout the Americans to help provide their lives with a sense of meaning purpose and value, as well as cultural continuity to the communities they had been stole from. Maritime maroons, who were captives who escaped across water, employed African canoeing, swimming, and paddleboarding skills and understandings of navigation to escape from slavery. They illustrate how Africans and members of the diaspora transformed the Caribbean into a physical and spiritual “sea of islands” that was part of a larger aqueous continent, linking African-descended communities in Africa, the Caribbean, North America, South America, Europe, and the spirit realm, located at the bottom of the ocean, into one vast cultural space.