Arielle Alterwaite is a Penn SAS Fellow and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania where she studies slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world with a focus on France and its empire. She is broadly interested in histories of political economy, capitalism, national sovereignty, abolition, reparations, and imperialism.
Q: Who is an author that you think more early Americanists should read?
Alterwaite: It is too hard for me to name just one. In 1983, editors of The Radical History Review published a compilation of interviews in a volume entitled Visions of History. These conversations were conducted with historians around the general theme of what makes history radical and what is radical history. Though somewhat far afield from the world early Americanists often inhabit, the musings of EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Natalie Zemon Davis, Herbert Gutman, and CLR James are particularly poignant reads for the present. Though not one of the interviewees, Carlo Ginzburg should always be required reading for any historian.
Shifting gears to an author who wrote about subjects within the locus of their area of study, I think more early Americanists should read WEB DuBois, especially the late DuBois of The World and Africa (1947). DuBois had a lot to say about slavery and capitalism long before the post-2008 "new" school came along. In a similar vein, although the internet tells me that Michel Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past now has over 10,200 citations in the three decades since it was published, I wish more people read Trouillot's 1982 article "Motion in the System." By comparison, Trouillot's article has only received 158 citations last I checked. Still, as the title reveals, its metaphors for the agents of historical change alone render it worthy reading.
Q: What is something you've read or watched recently that other early Americanists might find interesting?
Alterwaite: I am fascinated by conversations about the art market and restitution and find that the emphasis on histories of acquisition and ideas of value have fruitful resonances with Early Americanists who work through questions of agency and the archive. In recent literature and cinema, my recommended must-sees and reads are Alice Rohrwacher's feature La Chimera (2023; shout out to my Early Americanist UPenn colleague Molly Leech for the rec!), Mati Diop's documentary Dahomey (2024) and Teju Cole's novel Tremor (2023). For their antecedents, see Chris Marker and Alain Resnais' Statues Also Die — Les statues meurent aussi (1953; unfortunately, Isaac Julian's installation Once Again… (Statues Never Die) from 2022 is no longer up at Philadelphia's Barnes Foundation, but trust that it was a fantastic reappraisal).
In terms of oldies but goodies, I recently finished Guy Endore's Babouk (1934; but do not miss the 1991 edition with a must-read introduction by Jamaica Kincaid) and wished it was more widely discussed in the fields of the Haitian Revolution and enslaved people's insurrections more broadly. The power of narrating revolution emerges strongly and it should be required reading as Philadelphia gears up for its sestercentennial celebrations.
For films, I recently "discovered" the historical drama Burn! (1969). Gillo Pontecorvo (better known for The Battle of Algiers, released three years prior in 1966) directed it, Ennio Morricone wrote the score, and Marlon Brando both starred in and financed it. Set in the fictionalized Caribbean Portuguese colony of Queimada (the eponymous Portuguese name from which the film derives its title) in the 1840s, it masterfully wrangles with big themes of financial capitalism, informal imperialism, decolonial revolution, and liberal abolition. If you can get beyond the initially painful dubbing, Brando, who plays the British schemester seeking to profit off slave rebellions led by José Dolores (played by the Colombian herdsman-turned-actor-turned-herdsman Evaristo Màrquez), himself once claimed that he "did some of [his] best acting in Burn!" And if you haven't seen it, "Christopher," the 42nd episode of The Sopranos (September 2002), is about as good as it gets if you want to watch something that interrogates the problems of commemorating Columbus Day, a topic that all early Americanists can surely appreciate.
Q: What is the primary source you've most enjoyed using in your research?
Alterwaite: I work on the history of sovereign debt in the first half of the nineteenth century. My dissertation takes the case of Haitian debt, and the 1825 Haitian Indemnity in particular, to tell a story about the relationship between the abolition of slavery, political revolution, and imperial sovereignty in the Caribbean, on the one hand, and the world of debt, markets, and money centered in Europe, on the other. The research involves a lot of financial records and other boring papers, but there is a lot of fun stuff, too. As a cop-out of having to pick just one primary source, I'll say that whenever humor emerges from the sources, it is more than a reprieve from the weight of the historical past. Rather, I've learnt that paying attention to what people in the past found funny can reveal lots of things. And though certainly offensive, working within the genre of satirical cartoons from my period has proved particularly fruitful. If you are interested, see the 1825 "Dialogue between a sovereign and a pound note" in the British Museum's online collections as a case in point.
Q: What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the field of early American studies?
Alterwaite: The fifth most cited article of all time published in the American Historical Review is Vincent Brown's "Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery." In it, historians' decisions to tell stories that privilege either system or agency are described as "false choices." Though the point has been made by far too many historians to enumerate here, constant interrogation of the "false choices" we hold when we try to wrangle the complexity of the past into dualistic narratives strikes me as a worthwhile exercise. And since 2026 is also fast approaching, much work still needs to be done to overcome narratives of American exceptionalism. Thankfully, there is no shortage of methods at our disposal to do so.
Q: What are you most enjoying about your Fellowship at the McNeil Center?
Alterwaite: Virginia Woolf was so right to place "so much stress on money and a room of one's own." The McNeil Center provides both, and I know all the fellows are very grateful for them. What Woolf perhaps missed in her focus on the life of the mind (though, to be fair, she does have some nice reflections on the importance of "common life" vs. the "little separate lives which we live as individuals") are the virtues of community and, above all, friendship. And this has truly been the most enjoyable thing the McNeil Center Fellowship affords. Speaking now for myself, I know my work and life are much better for it.
Arielle Alterwaite is a Penn SAS Fellow and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. Read more about her dissertation on her bio page.