Getting Free

Abstract

I employ Marshall Berman’s and Stephen Kern’s cultural analyses of modernity in late 19th-and early 20th-century Europe and the United States to examine basketball’s invention, rules, and technical and institutional development. This yields two overlapping images of basketball. First, I situate basketball within the broader context of 19th-century modernization, where, as an effect of and response to modernization, I view it as a specimen of 19th-century modernism. Second, zooming in to this first image of basketball as a 19th-century modernism, I examine basketball as a semi-autonomous modern world of its own. Within this world, I identify the appearance of a new subject—the basketball player—who engaged and transformed the spatio-temporal experiences of modernity by inventing artistic “varieties of basketball modernism,” which achieved significant popularity in the American cultural landscape of the first half of the 20th century. I therefore also track the consolidation of an institutional network—the “modern basketball state”—arising to control the basketball player’s creativity and capitalize on the sport’s popularity, and I critique the myth the modern basketball state generated to obscure its own real history and to promote the belief that the sport could not exist without it.