Literary Studies Beyond “The Colonial Book”: A Response to Isabel Hofmeyr’s Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House

Abstract

In her discussion of censorship in Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House, Isabel Hofmeyr homes in on a figure of reading invoked by Nadine Gordimer in a letter protesting that the censors treat literature “as a commodity to be boiled down to its components and measured like a bar of soap.”1 Hofmeyr, recognizing that such reading echoes that of the officials of colonial custom houses, asks what we might learn from those “who tried to read a book as a bar of soap”?2