ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: DIXIE’S LAST STAND: OLE MISS, THE BODY, AND THE SPECTACLE OF DIXIE SOUTH WHITENESS Joshua Isaac Newman, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Dissertation directed by: Professor David L. Andrews Department of Kinesiology The interrelated studies within this dissertation provide new insights into the problematic nature of identity and the political disposition of the performative body in the contemporary American South. In particular, this research project will expand upon an emergent critical sociology of the South, particularly by interrogating the sporting and physical cultures of the University of Mississippi (‘Ole Miss’)—an institution which has historically functioned to discipline and authorize a preferred culture of the segregated body and the segregation of physical cultures. By investigating the genealogical ascendancy of whiteness at the University, as well as the more contemporaneous materializations of iniquitous social hierarchies, this dissertation disrupts ‘traditional’ notions of representation, subjectivity, and identity at Ole Miss. Looking beyond black and white, past the conventions of modern identity theory, this study interrupts the binaries of race and gender and reconsiders the dominant subject positions which actively shape the social experience on the Ole Miss campus. Through analysis of local cultural physicalities, namely the celebrity discourses of sporting icons Archie and Eli Manning and Confederate Civil War heroes such as the ‘University Greys,’ the symbolic embodiments of the Ole Miss brand (from the waving of the Confederate flag to the caricatured physicalities of the sporting mascot, Colonel Rebel), the complex relations between the student body and the campus space, and the spectacular practices of corporeal whiteness, this dissertation empirically identifies and theoretically criticizes the disciplinary regimes of power which normalize and marginalize the cultural experiences of the Ole Miss student subject. Engaging a qualitatively-grounded, multimethod analysis of the multifarious ways in which whiteness is encoded and decoded through discourses of the corporeal, this project is intended to begin the formulation of a broader interpretive framework from which the cultures of the body and the discourses of overt Southern whiteness can be understood as: 1) intersecting planes of postmodern subjectivity; and 2) the return of a conservative American ‘ethnocentric monoculturalism.’ DIXIE’S LAST STAND: OLE MISS, THE BODY, AND THE SPECTACLE OF DIXIE SOUTH WHITENESS by Joshua Isaac Newman Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment Of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2005 Advisory Committee: Professor David L. Andrews, Chair Professor Sheri L. Parks Professor Darcy Plymire Professor Michael L. Silk Professor Deborah R. Young © Copyright by Joshua Isaac Newman 2005 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ........................................................................................... v Prologue: It’s Good to Be Home ................................................................ 1 My ‘Redneck Past’ .......................................................................... 3 Chapter I: Confederacies and Corporealities ........................................... 13 The Postmodern South ................................................................. 22 Conceptualizing Contemporary Dixieland........................... 24 Into the White ..................................................................... 28 The [Corpo]Realities of Dixie South Whiteness at Ole Miss.......... 38 Critically Rethinking Rebel Culture ..................................... 43 Ethnographic Participant Observation................... 51 Critical Media Studies ........................................... 54 Contextual Historiography..................................... 57 Qualitative Interviews............................................ 61 Rigor and Representation ..................................... 63 On the Performative Politics of Interrogating Dixie ............. 67 Dixie’s Last Stand ......................................................................... 74 Chapter II: The Making of Dixie South Whiteness.................................... 88 The Political Economy of the Cotton South................................... 90 An Institutional Cornerstone.......................................................... 95 Demarcation and Docility.................................................... 98 Student Bodies of the Oxford Orthodoxy .......................... 104 The Dominion of Time and Space....................... 106 Dixieland [Deport]mentalities .............................. 110 Therapeutic Whiteness ....................................... 114 In the Gloaming of Antebellum Whiteness .................................. 117 Chapter III: Reconstructing the Closed University.................................. 120 Closing Ranks around ‘New South’ Whiteness ........................... 126 Reconstruction, Starting from the Center ......................... 129 The Binary Mosaic............................................................ 137 Emancipation and Rearticulation ........................ 139 Old Habitus . Die Hard .................................... 147 The Ring of Southern Belles ............................... 150 War and Football......................................................................... 157 The Beauty of Grey? ........................................................ 158 The Southern Sporting Logician ....................................... 164 Embodiments of ‘New South’ Ole Miss ....................................... 168 Learning Whiteness.......................................................... 172 The Sanctified Student Body ............................................ 178 Southern Physicalities ...................................................... 183 Dixieland, Reconstructed ............................................................ 192 ii CONTENTS (Continued) Chapter IV: Technologies of the South .................................................. 194 The Second Reconstruction........................................................ 200 A Retaliatory Science ....................................................... 201 The Dixiecrat Prologue .................................................... 205 Whiteness, Interrupted ................................................................ 210 Campaign of Hate............................................................. 223 PM.................................................................................... 227 Southern Territories .................................................................... 234 Southern Man[ning]..................................................................... 237 Conceptualizing Rebel Celebrity ...................................... 238 Archie ‘Super’ Manning: Hero of the Visible Center ......... 243 ‘Gentle’ Blackness............................................................ 251 The Neo-Confederate Generation............................................... 255 Good Ole Boys from the ‘New New South’....................... 262 Eli Manning: Modern Prince of the New Sporting South... 265 Brave New Whiteness?............................................................... 272 Chapter V: The Decontextualized Brand................................................ 278 The Brand Logics of Dixie South Whiteness ............................... 291 ‘Dual Unity’ and Southern Singularity ............................... 296 Southern Solidarity and Différance................................... 302 Brand on the Run ........................................................................ 307 Stars, Bars, and Racial Scars........................................... 314 The Colonel of Militant Whiteness .................................... 336 The Corporate Logics of an Undying Soldier ...... 343 The Foundation(s) of Whiteness ......................... 346 Conquering Difference through Song ............................... 349 Reconciling the Present .............................................................. 356 Chapter VI: Southern Spaces ................................................................ 364 The Land of Cotton ..................................................................... 369 Spatializing the Hotty Toddy Body.................................... 375 An Insipid Phantasmagoria............................................... 380 The Ole Miss Aesthetic .............................................................. 386 The Spatial Fabric of the Memorialized South.................. 395 Halls and Walls ................................................... 399 A Lucid Labyrinth ................................................ 401 Resurrections of the Insurrection ........................ 406 Southern Synoecism ........................................................ 408 Six Columns........................................................ 412 Concentric Whiteness ......................................... 414 Pillars of Ole Miss Power .................................... 416 Collective Dreams of the New Confederacy................................ 419 iii CONTENTS (Continued) Chapter VII: Dixie Spectacular............................................................... 421 Situating Oxford .......................................................................... 426 Society of the Dixie South