Place, Platform, and Value: Periodicals and the Pacific in Late Colonial Modernity

Kuttainen, Victoria; Liebich, Susann; Galletly, Sarah

doi:10.1353/esc.2015.0007

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 13 publications

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“…Historians, art historians, and literary critics each mapped local engagement with international currents in modernity and vernacular expressions of the modern. During the first flush of the twenty‐first century, these scholars gave us Dance Hall and Picture Palace : Sydney's Romance with Modernity (Matthews, ), The Spectacular Modern Woman (Conor, ), Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia (Dixon & Kelly, ), Modern Times : The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia (Goad et al, ), Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity (Dixon, ), and Almost Always Modern : Australian Print Cultures and Modernity (Carter, ), as well as a swathe of articles (Beilharz, ; Carter, ; Kuttainen et al, ; Levi, ; McKenzie, ). Taken together, this scholarship established that Sydney was not ‘the last station on the line, a backwater ten years behind Europe and America but rather ‘a busy port of call in the ceaseless international ebb and flow of commerce and ideas that underpin cosmopolitan modernity (Matthews, , 8).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading Australian modernity: Unsettled settlers and cultures of mobility

Rees

2017

History Compass

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What did Australian modernity look like? Over the last two decades, Australia's entrenched reputation for ‘cultural belatedness’ has been displaced by the study of ‘colonial modernity’. No longer beholden to the idea that a singular modernity was disseminated from core to periphery, scholars now speak of many localised modernities that arose across colonial and provincial sites. According to this new ‘multiple modernities’ paradigm, Australia was home to its own home‐grown incarnation of modern life. But what was distinctively ‘Australian’ about Australian modernity? Although widely discussed in recent historiography, scholars have yet to delineate its distinguishing features. This article posits mobility as a central component of the Australian modern. Drawing upon new scholarship in settler colonial studies and transnational history, it argues that early twentieth‐century Australia was home to intense cultures of both domestic and global mobility that were entangled with the geographies and anxieties of the settler colonial project. It shows how the nation's ‘unsettled settlers’ also became its chief agents of modernity, and in doing so draws together several strands in recent historiography. Although mobility also signified modernity beyond Australia, it was within this settler colonial nation tyrannised by distance that the modern appetite for motion reached especial heights.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading Australian modernity: Unsettled settlers and cultures of mobility

Rees

2017

History Compass

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Making Friends of the Nations: Australian Interwar Magazines and Middlebrow Orientalism in the Pacific

Kuttainen¹,

Galletly²

2016

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As travel began to massify in the aftermath of the Great War when passenger ships still regularly stopped at ports of call, and as Australia developed a sub-imperial relationship to its near Melanesian neighbors in Papua and New Guinea, the Pacific and its islands loomed large in Australian consciousness and print culture. This article employs Christina Klein's concept of "middlebrow orientalism" to examine how Australia's quality magazines, MAN and The BP Magazine, reflected an "expansive material and symbolic investment in Asia and the Pacific" (2003: 11) between the two world wars. While development of a consumerist, leisure relationship with the region is in evidence in these magazines that undoubtedly assume the superiority of White Australia, we argue they also promote diversity, inclusiveness, and an emerging maturity in outlook that conveyed the way in which Australians began to understand themselves as Pacific citizens wishing to "make friends of the nations.

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Place, Platform, and Value: Periodicals and the Pacific in Late Colonial Modernity

Cited by 2 publications

References 13 publications

Reading Australian modernity: Unsettled settlers and cultures of mobility

Reading Australian modernity: Unsettled settlers and cultures of mobility

Making Friends of the Nations: Australian Interwar Magazines and Middlebrow Orientalism in the Pacific

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