'Left of Black': Episode #24 featuring Pierre & Jamyla Bennu and Rebecca Walker

Left of Black Episode # 24

w/Pierre & Jamyla Bennu & Rebecca Walker

March 7, 2011

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Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by filmmaker and conceptual artist Pierre Bennu and his partner Jamyla Bennu. Latter writer Rebecca Walker joins Neal, also via Skype, from her home in Hawaii.

→Pierre Bennu is a filmmaker and conceptual artist. Among his work is the full length film Red Bone Guerillas (2003) and film shorts including “Sun Moon Child” (2007) and the “Black Moses Barbie” (2011) series. Bennu is also the author of BS or Fertilizer. Bennu runs the small business, Oyin Handmade, making natural skin and hair care products and the production company ExittheApple.com with his wife and partner Jamyla Bennu.

→Rebecca Walker is an award-winning speaker, teacher, and bestselling author. She presents ideas about race, class, culture, gender, and the evolution of the human family that challenge ideological rigidity and encourage fresh approaches to enduring conflicts. Time Magazine named her one of the fifty most influential leaders of her generation. Walker is the author of two memoirs, Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of the Shifting Self (2002) and Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After A Lifetime of Ambivalence (2008).


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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

"Sampling Soul": The Mid-Term Exam

9th Wonder and I intended the course "Sampling Soul" to be accessible to a wider audience than that contained in the classroom. In that spirit, we are making the mid-term exam available to the public and encouraging readers to respond to the prompt. The best responses will be published @ NewBlackMan.

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Sampling Soul

Mark Anthony Neal, Ph.D. (e-mail: man9@duke.edu)

9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit)

Midterm Examination

Answer the essay question as comprehensively as possible.

Response should be typed and double-spaced. (minimum 1500 words; 4-6 pages)

Throughout McLeod’s Freedoms of Expression and Schur’s Parodies of Ownership, both authors make claims about black communal practices (and examples of non-black oral cultures) that embraced informal notions of borrowing, revision, and sharing; practices which became critical to musical and performance practices amongst black performers. In his video treatment of Imani Uzuri’s “Sun Moon Child,” visual artist Pierre Bennu makes an even more explicit claim on this culture of borrowing, revision and sharing, by literally linking various performance movements across time and space (diaspora). Bennu produced his treatment using fair use doctrine, to protect his use of Uzuri’s music, as well as the imagery of noted black performers such as Nina Simone, James Brown, Alvin Ailey, Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, Judith Jamison, The Jackson 5, Rita Moreno and countless others. Youtube recently removed Bennu’s video, which had been posted on the site for three years, claiming that it was copyright infringement.

Sun Moon Child from pierre bennu on Vimeo.

Using Bennu’s work as a backdrop, discuss the ways that black artists have employed formal and informal modes of borrowing, revision and sharing in musical, literary and visual arts. What is hip-hop’s relationship to these practices? How has the practice of contemporary musical sampling, largely influenced by hip-hop production, altered the viability of these communal practices? Given the emergence of intellectual property law in the last decade, what are the implications for communal art practices and “black” art in general? In that Soul and Funk music have been used as raw material in hip-hop sampling practices, how has sampling impacted the legacy and commercial value of these musical genres and the artists that produce them? From the standpoint of intellectual property law, how would you defend or reject Bennu’s claim that “Sun Moon Child” is fair use?

Remember My Name: Dionne Farris & R&B's Outliers

from The Root

What Happened to Dionne Farris?
by Mark Anthony Neal

The crooner who stole Arrested Development’s track nearly 20 years ago is back—on the Internet. While you’re reuniting with Farris, check out the new crop of black female artists who are keeping soul music honest.

Singer Dionne Farris had become little more than a musical footnote, that talented backup singer on Arrested Development’s alternative hip-hop classic “Tennessee,” who wrested the song from lead vocalist Speech as she wailed, “won’t you help me, won’t you help me, understand your plan.”

Thankfully, she has resurfaced—on the Internet. For Truth If Not Love and Signs of Life, released on her own label, Free & Clear, and on MySpace, mark a new phase in Farris’ career and, with it, a new wave of attention to underplayed soul songstresses.

Farris’ return comes after a nasty parting of ways with her former label, Columbia, which wanted her to produce black-radio-friendly, neo-soul tracks, even though her post-Arrested Development breakout single, “I Know,” was a mainstream video pop hit. At a creative impasse, she requested and gained a release from her contract.

That was more than a decade ago.

Farris’ story is not unlike countless black women in the recording industry. But the marginalization—some of it self-imposed—serves as a necessary function, allowing the tradition of R&B to remain rooted in a politics of remembrance and accountability that simply couldn’t survive in the full bloom of the marketplace.

This is the role being played by a new crop of dynamic women soul singers, including Imani Uzuri, Muhsinah Abdul-Karim and Georgia Anne Muldrow.

Read the Full Essay @