[Un]veiling the White Gaze: Revealing Self and Other in the Land Where the Blues Began

[T]he man who adores the Negro is as sick as the man who abominates him. --Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (8). Drawing on Frantz Fanon's research to discuss Alan Lomax's landmark study The Land Where the Blues Began (hereafter The Land) may seem problematic considering that the texts are from different fields of study, concerned with oppressed people in different countries, and examines different socio-cultural phenomenon. Fanon's texts are post-colonial projects that theorize the impact of oppression on the African psyche. In contrast, Lomax's ethnography is a study and celebration of African American blues as a creative expression and cultural tradition. However, on a closer examination, one notices that Fanon and Lomax have the same preoccupation: the black and white dialectic. Lomax explores the relationship between Southern racism and blues singers and Fanon studies codependency in the relationship between the colonizer and colonized. Fanon's writing examines how the black and white dialectic robs the Negro of his identity and cultural moorings, and Lomax's interviews depict how white subjectivity is affirmed at the expense of black identity. Fanon argues that the Negro's behavior serves as a reminder that mental and physical slavery are equally detrimental and Lomax believes that the creations that originate out of slavery demonstrates the Negro's imagination and inventiveness. The Negroes whom Lomax interviews and observes regularly experience racial oppression. They live under Jim Crow laws in segregated communities, lack the same employment and educational opportunities as whites, and are victims of random mental and physical violence. The terror under which the Negroes in Lomax's study endure shapes how they perceive themselves, Lomax, and other Southern whites. The deference the interviewees show Lomax and the white authority figures with whom they come into contact illustrate the long-term effects of enslavement (such as loss of identity and feelings of inferiority). Lomax's Negroes exemplify Fanon's theory that subordination remains in the consciousness of the oppressed long after decolonization. Lomax is structurally positioned in the same way as Fanon--the scientific intellectual studying a folk phenomenon. Similar to Fanon, Lomax's project is personal as well as historical, social, and cultural because it is rhetorically structured as a series of personal narratives, a journey in the land where the blues began. However, unlike Fanon, Lomax writes for a normative audience like himself (white, male, and liberal) who are interested in his subject and perspective on rural Southern blues music and culture. Neither Lomax nor his white audience have personally witnessed or experienced first-hand the deconstruction of black identity. They are aware of racial inequalities but not the extent to which the materiality of the black Delta residents impedes subjectivity formation. Since he is a white man, Lomax can't experience black Southern culture like the Delta residents. He doesn't know that an authentic black experience doesn't exist and he can't explain to his audience the extent to which the white unconscious is inscribed in racialized discourses about black people (Oforlea 21-23). Lomax's white privilege impedes his ability to theorize blues performances as simultaneously taking place within and without white culture. Exoticizing and primitivizing the blues, Lomax writes with admiration in his book The Land, "I was overcome with wonder. How could these worn farm laborers and their slave ancestors, driven, demeaned, and cruelly exploited, have created songs so full of nobility and love?" (Lomax 78). Lomax marvels at the intrinsic ability of blues musicians to craft history and legacies of slavery into testimonies about love, sadness, and frustration. While he appreciates the narratives that the musicians tell and sing about themselves, their parents', and their grandparents' social experiences (rootlessness, alienation, and failed relationships), Lomax romanticizes the blues musicians as descendants of African gods, who, through the sheer power of their musical talent, have the ability to tame the American wilderness (212-213). …