Dockside Reading - Hydrocolonialism And The Custom House - Hofmeyr, Isabel

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.

Softcover. English. Wits University Press. 2022. ISBN: 9781776147625. 121 pp. Good. Book No: 2507026