Speaking Through Othello: Black Performance and the Training of Feeling

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”.