Abstract
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 did – as 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 and copyright – customs officials ‘assayed’ books like cargo (10). Chapter 1 uses the biography of the customs official George Rutherford to sketch how the custom house developed as a hydrocolonial institution, inheriting the complex practices of customs as an ‘empire within an empire’ and elaborating them in new settings. Officials like Rutherford blended landed and maritime authority, from the quasi-naval uniforms they wore and flags they flew to the elaborate rituals of ‘landing’ enacted from the three-mile mark of sovereignty. Chapter 2 examines customs procedures and protocols, tracing the many methods that examiners used to ‘read’ cargo and then to reinscribe it with their own series of marks. Hofmeyr's whirlwind tour of how customs assayed objects, how suspect goods were regarded as epidemiological threats, and how they might be spared from destruction by marks of origin that rendered them ‘white’ and ‘respectable’ makes for surprisingly entertaining reading. It also neatly sets up the third chapter, which looks at the complex politics of copyright at the port, where it was ‘but one mark in a galaxy of inscriptions circulating on the dockside’ (56). This chapter will disabuse the reader of any notion of the frictionless flow of ideas across borders. One is left thinking of passengers frantically organizing their books for customs officers on the lookout for infringement of British copyright, who were quite prepared to heave offending volumes over the side (49–50).
On a hydrocolonial border, copyright could also be deployed for other purposes far beyond the custom house – for example, by African intellectuals who managed to publish in Britain and so secure for their imported work (which officials might never read) the credentialed legitimacy of a ‘white’ volume. Chapter 4 looks at ‘undesirable’ publications and how customs officers read logistically – scanning metadata, sampling and counting – as part of a broader regime of censorship that began at the dockside. This chapter begins in Sydney with young officials whose dreams of chasing smugglers were replaced with dreary days of looking for smut, searching for anything that might damage the moral health of White Australia. A ‘logic of contamination and infection’ prevailed at the port, where books were quite literally judged by their covers and could be ‘burned, cast out to sea, pulped, or torn, by hand, into tiny pieces’ (71).
As a whole, this small volume and the concept of ‘hydrocolonialism’ is a very useful addition to scholarship on the littoral, helping theorize the ways in which maritime and terrestrial authorities blended into and overlapped one another, and how that process can be charted. I wholeheartedly recommend it to maritime historians, as well as to imperial historians, literary scholars in the ‘blue humanities’, historians of the book, and indeed anyone researching the environs of the port and its archives. My only criticism (and it is a small one) is that the chronology can seem a bit loose, as Hofmeyr occasionally leaps back and forth from the 1880s to the 1950s. But in a book that is so short, this is a small quibble.
As I wrote this review, I sat in a café on Hobart's waterfront, where vessels from South African ports once berthed at convict-built docks. The custom house (now Parliament House) dominated my sightline. Beyond me, about 10 minutes’ walk away, lay the Tasmanian State Library and Archives, whose heritage collections were shaped by zealous customs officers. Behind me, somewhere around the three-mile mark, there might have been an artificial reef of other, discarded libraries. It is a fanciful idea, perhaps, but nevertheless a new perspective on the relationship between ship and shore, between archives, libraries, customs and dockside, which I would never have glimpsed without this book and for which I am very grateful.