Dockside Reading: 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. 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. Set in the environmental context of the colonial port city, Dockside Reading explores how imperialism colonizes water. Hofmeyr examines this theme through the concept of hydrocolonialism, which puts together land and sea, empire and environment.

Genres: History

136 pages, Hardcover

Published February 11, 2022

Reviews

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 ‘From Nathaniel Hawthorne onward, the Custom House has been thought of as an antiliterary space of cloddish bureaucrats. Dockside Reading offers a different perspective, arguing that the object-oriented reading of the wharfside, and the coastal environment in which it unfolded, provides examples of reading that are of considerable interest to a posthumanist, Anthropocene age.’

4 ‘Port cities aim to pave the ocean and assert sovereignty over the conjuncture of land and sea. Yet they are unstable spaces, perched on reclaimed land and propped up by submarine engineering. On this artificial ground, port authorities have long designed regulatory media and regimes of identification to manage the coastal seam on which they work and to control the passage of people and cargo from ship to shore. Fashioned as much around commodities as human bodies, these regimens rely on object-oriented hermeneutical practices. I describe these protocols as dockside reading, shaped in the regulatory regimes and coastal environments of the colonial port city.’

20 ‘Ships were textual machines (or “floating secretariats”) that transported and produced vast numbers of documents and publications.’

84 ‘As books crossed a hydrocolonial frontier, Customs examiners momentarily had to become book historians, pondering how to configure the inside and the outside of the book. Their default position was to trust the outside while downplaying the textual interior or treating it as infected. However, as a key substance of the book, the printed words insisted on being assayed in some way. Inspectors had to reach some accommodation with the inside of the book, which they did through their dockside hermeneutics. These were shaped hydrocolonially, by the elemental politics of the port, by the epidemiological and ideological prerogatives of the colonial maritime frontier, and by the books themselves.’

[Keely Shinners · Rating 4 out of 5]

Isabel Hofmeyr traces a fascinating history of commodity, bureaucracy and readership by honing in on the Custom House as an arena of inquiry. How objects were handled, classified, recorded and archived by the colonial officials reveals so many interesting attitudes of the time. The reverence around objects and the obsessive science that arises to categorize them. The thin line between contaminated objects and antagonistic ideas. The hierarchy of labour relations, defined not only by colour lines, but also by the workers’ proximity to the ocean: the dryer you were, the higher your rank.

I’m not entirely sure about the stakes of such a project beyond detailing the origins of the utterly absurd border control mechanisms that persist to this day. But I kind of don’t care, allured as I am by tales (some of them paranoid fabulations) of weapons hidden in walking sticks and tobacco woven into ropes, as well as the ever-illicit spectre of seditious literature, all of these objects disappeared: burned, or left to rot, or dumped into the ocean. I wonder what all of these so-called troublesome objects, dumped just off the shore, so close, yet denied circulation, have done to our collective psyche.

[Ed Stoddard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A crisp work of scholarship that raises questions about the "hydro-colonial" past of the port city of Halifax where this reviewer grew up. Stay tuned for a proper review ...