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

Conceptualizing the 1920s and 30s as an historical era of new media, we explore how leisure and culture magazines vied for consumer and cultural capital alongside other media platforms that they featured and reviewed, thus crossing and constructing hierarchies of value. In Part One, we advance a conceptual discussion that brings together explorations of colonialism and modernity to consider the Pacific basin as a region captured by rapidly expanding and internationalizing mass media. We introduce Madianou and Miller’s theory of polymedia to focus on how magazines function as an “integrated structure” featuring different media of varying cultural value. Using their framework, we consider magazines published on the Pacific basin as hosts of cultural material and “host platforms” through which editors and readers participated in constructing modernizing, mediated visions of the Pacific. In Part Two, we advance brief case studies of The BP Magazine (Australia, 1928-1942) and Sunset (USA, 1898-), using polymedia theory as a tool to explore how these magazines related to the Pacific—and remediated Pacific content—in shared yet distinct ways.