Forty-one years a slave: Agnosia and mobility in nineteenth-century Cuba

Abstract

ABSTRACT On the basis of a previously unstudied testimony, this study approaches the life of a slave from a methodological standpoint at the crossroads between Literary Studies and History. On 4 October 1853, a black man stepped into the U.S. consulate in Havana. According to the testimony he gave that day, he had been born free in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1812, at the age of ten or twelve, he was hired to work on a sloop that took him to Cuba, where he was kidnapped and sold as a slave. It would take him about forty-one years to reach the consulate and petition for his freedom. Opposing agnosia (“not-knowing”) to anagnorisis (“to recognize”), I explore different ways of (not) knowing linked to complicity, hypocrisy, and illegal slavery, while at the same time analyzing the slave’s storytelling as a form of mobility.