Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House

This roundtable features Isabel Hofmeyr in conversation with Jacquelyne Kosgei, Lesley Green and Stephanie Jones.

Dockside Reading is interested in the links between print culture, colonialism, and the ocean. 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.

Add event to calendar