Isabel Hofmeyr, "Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House" (Duke UP, 2022)

New Books in the Indian Ocean World · May 11, 2022 · 1h 3m

In Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House (Duke University Press, 2022), 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…