Army of Whiteness? Colonel Reb and the Sporting South's Cultural and Corporate Symbolic

This article contributes to an already vibrant discussion on the politics of race and ethnicity as mobilized through the semiotic embodiments of sporting mascots. Grounded in a poststructuralist theoretical framework, guided by the political thrust of cultural studies, and informed by a range of qualitative modes of inquiry, this study more specifically mediates on how the University of Mississippi's (“Ole Miss”) sporting mascot, Colonel Rebel, constitutes an important discursive space through which (a) the corporatized academic institution accumulates sign-valued capital and (b) the power/knowledge relationships formed under a localized spectator/fan subjectivity—constructed out of a parochial, conservative, “Old South” Whiteness—become incontrovertibly bound to the symbolic territories of a localized sporting neo-Confederacy.