What We Are Reading Today: ‘The African Revolution’

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Updated 03 April 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The African Revolution’

  • The African Revolution demonstrates that “the Scramble” and the resulting imperial order were as much the culmination of African revolutionary dynamics as they were of European expansionism

Author: RICHARD REID

Africa’s long 19th century was a time of revolutionary ferment and cultural innovation for the continent’s states, societies, and economies.

Yet the period preceding what became known as “the Scramble for Africa” by European powers in the decades leading up to World War I has long been neglected in favor of a Western narrative of colonial rule.

The African Revolution demonstrates that “the Scramble” and the resulting imperial order were as much the culmination of African revolutionary dynamics as they were of European expansionism.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Novel Relations’ by Alicia Mireles Christoff

Updated 11 January 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Novel Relations’ by Alicia Mireles Christoff

“Novel Relations” engages 20th-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory.

Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, Alicia Christoff reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read.

These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too.