ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the anglophone little magazines that were associated with the University of Papua New Guinea and The University of the South Pacific between the late 1960s and mid-1980s. Little magazines embody, in compact form, the trends, movements, rivalries, and preoccupations of modernisms across the world. Their significance as stores of aesthetic debate and as catalysts for innovation made them integral to modernist movements of hugely varied kinds. The little magazines of Oceania, true to form, were harbingers of change and midwives of talent. They burnt brightly and died quickly, but were the life of literary and creative scenes. Their readership was often small in number, and while they frequently struggled to get the right number or right kind of contributions, those that did read and contribute shaped social, cultural, political, and literary futures.
For these magazines, the aesthetic and the political were inextricable: the pages of their publications abound with the drive to write new countries and new identities into being, while forging links between precolonial pasts and postcolonial presents. There is little doubt that these periodicals were instrumental in the formation of an Oceanian modernity, but this chapter also positions them as the midwives of an Oceanian modernism. They are modernist, this chapter argues, because they wrote a modernity into being, giving it a rhetoric, a vision, purpose, and an imaginary. They are also modernist because their form and content combine local preoccupations, languages, and voices with interests and agendas that link Oceanian publications to modernist magazines across the world, creating clusters with canonical and postcolonial publications.
