What can we learn from men who 'read a book like a bar of soap' (65)?How does doing so help us to understand the relationship between water and political authority in colonial port cities? Isabel Hofmeyr's Dockside Reading aims to answer these questions in a short but rich volume that will appeal to a wide array of scholars working at the water's edge.Located mostly in South Africa in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century (with brief sojourns to Australia and the West Indies), the book draws on a wide selection of archival sources, interpreted through a stunning array of interdisciplinary citations.It is also a very well-crafted book, which manages to be theoretically sophisticated, empirically grounded and also highly readable.Dockside Reading focuses on the custom house in the 'noisome location' (2) of the colonial port, tracking printed material from ship to shore through byzantine customs regulations, the littoral environment and port architecture.Books and printed matter were, Hofmeyr argues, understood as cargo, infused with epidemiological peril and subject to control and categorization (4).They were also part of the infrastructure of the colonial port, shaped by its carceral regimes and the unfree labour that built colonial port cities.By seeing books as customs officials didas cargo -Hofmeyr is able to deploy and develop her concept of 'hydrocolonialism', which theorizes 'how water sculpts political authority' ( 16), how water comes to be colonized, and how colonial literary formations are shaped by the littoral.A hydrocolonial lens requires thinking across multiple scales (or 'different water worlds', as Hofmeyr puts it), from large-scale meteorological patterns (like the monsoon cycle) to dynamic coastal environments and submarine structures (both natural and man-made; 17).It also pays close attention to the specifics of how sovereignty was exercised on and around the littoral by looking at how land-based regimes of authority are extended out to sea and how maritime conditions influence political regimes on land.In four succinct yet evocative chapters, Hofmeyr uses the institution of the colonial custom house and its officials to demonstrate how 'hydrocolonialism' can be deployed as a powerful analytic lens and, indeed, how much can be learned from men who 'read a book like a bar of soap'.In their 'dockside reading'not only of books, but also of complicated tariff handbooks, customs marks and inscriptions, marks of origin
Annaliese Claydon (Tue,) studied this question.