Wednesday 18 November 2026, 18:00, Holborn, Barnard’s Inn Hall. Free for everyone. Limited reserved tickets available for RSL Members and Fellows.
In this lecture, Jason Allen-Paisant brings together psychoanalytic and critical theory with lived artistic practice to rethink what it means to inhabit Shakespeare’s most charged role. Drawing on Self-Portrait as Othello, he explores how the character has functioned as a symbolic demand placed on Black performance.
Against traditions that presume a universal paternal order, the lecture asks what happens when that anchor is foreclosed in history, and how Black performance invents other ways of organising meaning—through voice, breath, sound, prayer, and what Allen-Paisant calls a “training of feeling”.
Speakers
Jason Allen-Paisant DPhil (Oxon), FRSL, is Professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. A poet and writer from Jamaica, Allen-Paisant makes work that grapples with issues of living, sensing, and loving in the aftermath of colonial and ecological rupture. His second poetry collection, Self-Portrait as Othello, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2023. He is also the author of the philosophical treatise Engagements with Aimé Césaire. A book-length poem, SNOW, is forthcoming with Penguin in 2027. He has received fellowships from institutions such as the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, the University of East Anglia, and Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
The Royal Society of Literature Series
This series brings together leading writers, scholars and artists to explore how literature shapes the ways we understand history, identity and storytelling. Hosted in partnership with Gresham College, the series examines Black performance and Shakespeare, the recovery of overlooked lives and forgotten histories, and the creative possibilities of literary adaptation. Together, these lectures reveal how writers revisit the past, challenge inherited narratives and create new ways of seeing the world through literature.
Presented in partnership with Gresham College.
