ABSTRACT
Powerful new forms of mass culture coalesced during the interwar period, a consequence of new technologies—the phonograph, radio, and cinema—and the industries that emerged to profit from them. This mass culture made the world’s popular cultures increasingly legible to each other, even as it kept their commonalities hidden from view, reproducing, and even deepening the perception of national difference. This essay aims to make sense of these multiplying forms of connection and rupture by sketching the history of two vital arenas of interwar mass culture: popular music and sports. Both proved central to efforts to construct and disseminate national identities, even as they also enabled individuals and groups to build solidarities across those divisions. Neither essentially disciplinary nor liberatory, interwar mass culture produced new modes of belonging and new languages of contestation.
