Stories of the Port: Response to Isabel Hofmeyr, Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House

Abstract

Isabel Hofmeyr’s latest book begins with stories around and about the colonial port, though the initial spotlight is on decidedly nonnarrative texts such as classification lists of cargo items, customs handbooks, and what she intriguingly calls the “book-as-form,” namely diaries and registers. These, she says, “offered one unwitting model of colonial writing in which a template from the metropolis was filled with local scribblings” (12). The port is, by definition, a liminal, watery, zone, with uncertain borders between land and sea, but which often acts as the site of border policing that regulates entry into and out of the colony and nation-state. It is a powerfully evocative place around which to set Hofmeyr’s ambitious and wide-ranging book, and the port’s polysemous implications allow her to intervene across a series of disparate fields: climate humanities, postcolonial studies, object-oriented ontology, South African literary histories, and studies of custom and copyright. It is a masterly and original revisioning of what it means to do book history, offering a radically new method of reading. Even more importantly, it proposes a new definition of the book as object: as customs cargo, as charismatic “thing” that creates literary canonicity far from the metropole, and as an epidemiological vector of “contamination” in the mind of the colonial customs official on the alert for seditious or obscene texts, among other suggestive meanings.