Have You Heard George’s Podcast?

George Mpanga’s Have You Heard George’s Podcast? is a remarkable and arresting creative engagement with European colonialism and the Black Atlantic consciousness its afterlife produced. Through the portals of poetry, spoken word, music, and speculative fiction, Mpanga, or George the Poet, imagines new horizons of possibility and pushes the boundaries of language and word-play to explore issues of trauma, intimacy, work, art and creativity, belonging, attachment, and meaning in Black Atlantic worlds.

Sensitive in its attention to the conflicts and contradictions of black interior lives, and sensual in its conjuring of the emotional and affective demands and conditions of blackness, the podcast is innovative and evocative in its critical engagement with Black Atlantic intellectual politics, histories, and freedom struggles. On the one hand, it is cutting edge in its mobilization and performance of black creative expression, and cutting in its critiques of European empire, nationalism, and racism on the other.

The sonic and creative cultures and histories of black people in West Africa, England, the Caribbean, and the United States form the critical imaginary out of which George the Poet constructs a rich and provocative 21st-century Black Atlantic cosmos of cultural, artistic, intellectual, physic, emotional, and political imagination. For its innovative use of poetry, spoken word, and prose to build black worlds and to explore issues large and small, historical and contemporary, intimate and personal, Have You Heard George’s Podcast? wins a Peabody.