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.

中文翻译：

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港口的故事：对伊莎贝尔·霍夫迈尔的回应，码头阅读：水殖民主义和海关大楼

伊莎贝尔·霍夫梅尔 (Isabel Hofmeyr) 的最新著作以围绕殖民地港口的故事开始，尽管最初的焦点是明显非叙事性的文本，例如货物分类清单、海关手册，以及她有趣地称之为“书本形式”的东西，即日记和注册。她说，这些“提供了一种不知情的殖民写作模式，其中来自大都市的模板充满了当地的涂鸦”（12）。根据定义，该港口是一个有限的水域地带，陆地和海洋之间的边界不确定，但它通常充当边境警务场所，监管进出殖民地和民族国家。这是一个令人回味无穷的地方，霍夫梅尔雄心勃勃、内容广泛的书围绕着它展开，港口的多义含义使她能够介入一系列不同的领域：气候人文学科、后殖民研究、面向对象的本体论、南非文学史以及习俗和版权研究。它巧妙而独创地修订了研究书籍历史的意义，提供了一种全新的阅读方法。更重要的是，它提出了书作为对象的新定义：作为海关货物，作为在远离大都市的地方创造文学经典的有魅力的“东西”，作为殖民地海关官员心目中“污染”的流行病学载体警惕煽动性或淫秽文字，以及其他暗示性含义。提供一种全新的阅读方式。更重要的是，它提出了书作为对象的新定义：作为海关货物，作为在远离大都市的地方创造文学经典的有魅力的“东西”，作为殖民地海关官员心目中“污染”的流行病学载体警惕煽动性或淫秽文字，以及其他暗示性含义。提供一种全新的阅读方式。更重要的是，它提出了书作为对象的新定义：作为海关货物，作为在远离大都市的地方创造文学经典的有魅力的“东西”，作为殖民地海关官员心目中“污染”的流行病学载体警惕煽动性或淫秽文字，以及其他暗示性含义。