Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House
By Isabel Hofmeyr
In Dockside Reading, Isabel Hofmeyr traces the relationships among print culture, colonialism, and the ocean through the institution of the British colonial Custom House.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dockside customs officials would leaf through publications looking for obscenity, politically objectionable materials, or reprints of British copyrighted works, often dumping these condemned goods into the water.
These practices, echoing other colonial imaginaries of the ocean as a space for erasing incriminating evidence of the violence of empire, informed later censorship regimes under apartheid in South Africa.
Environmental context of the colonial port city
By tracking printed matter from ship to shore, Hofmeyr shows how literary institutions like copyright and censorship were shaped by colonial control of coastal waters.
“What happens to books when they cross borders? Isabel Hofmeyr sets her radically new history of literature not in the library but at the dock. In pages where authors and scholars are upstaged by censors, customs officers, and even dockhands, she challenges literary critics to think beyond the text as a static entity tied to a single nation or a single landmass. This is that rare book that will make it impossible to continue doing business as usual – for literary critics, for legal scholars, and for book historians.”
– Leah Price, Author of What We Talk about When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading
Set in the environmental context of the colonial port city, Dockside Reading explores how imperialism colonises water. Hofmeyr examines this theme through the concept of hydrocolonialism, which puts together land and sea, empire and environment.
“As we have come to expect from Isabel Hofmeyr, Dockside Reading is dazzlingly creative, intellectually playful, and immaculately crafted. This is a brilliant history of the ideas and textual forms that emerged from the damp crates that customs officials scoured at the water’s edge for signs of contamination. Setting sail from South Africa, ranging across the world’s oceans, this is a quietly revolutionary, fully aquatic literary history for our times.”
– Sunil Amrith, Dhawan Professor of History, Yale University
About the author
Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University.
She is co-editor of Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons, also published by Duke University Press, and author of Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading.
- Publisher | Wits University Press |
- ISBN | 978-1-77614-762-5 |
- Recommended Price | R300.00 |
- Subject | Cultural and Media Studies, Society and Social Science |
For more information | Corina van der Spoel | +27 (0)11 717 8705/8700 | mail me |
