Après des études d'histoire à l'Université de La Havane, Manuel Barcia a obtenu son Master et sa thèse d'histoire à l'Université d'Essex où il a ensuite enseigné. Il a été professeur à l'Université de Nottingham avant d'être recruté à Leeds en 2006. Ses recherches portent sur l'histoire de l'esclavage et de la traite dans le monde atlantique du XIXe siècle. Il a écrit pour The Washington Spectator, The Huffington Post, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, et Al Jazeera in English.En 2014, il a reçu le Prix d'Histoire Philip Leverhume. Il est actuellement membre non-résident du Hutchins Center's Afro-Latin American Institute (Harvard University) et au printemps 2017 il a été visiting fellow au Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (Yale University).

Résumé :

The Portuguese schooner Arrogante was captured in late November 1837 by the HMS Snake, off the coast of Cuba. At the time, the Arrogante had more than 330 Africans on board, who had been shipped in the Upper Guinea coast. Once the vessel arrived in Montego Bay, Jamaica, the British authorities apprenticed those who survived. Shortly after landing, however, the Arrogante’s sailors were accused of slaughtering an African man, cooking his flesh, and forcing the rest of the slaves on board to eat it. Furthermore, they were also accused of cooking and eating themselves the heart and liver of the same man. This article focuses not so much on the actual event, as on the follow up transatlantic process where knowledge was produced and contested, and where meanings and predetermined cultural notions related to morality and natural laws were probed and queried. Overall, this sui-generis case offers hard-wearing evidence to suggest that Africans’ beliefs and fears on white cannibalism were not based solely in folklore, as it has been usually assumed, but that they may have been founded on assumptions about real incidents that took place in the Hidden Atlantic, away from ports, authorities and reliable witnesses.

Cette conférence a lieu dans le cadre du "Cycle de conférences Caraïbes" du laboratoire Mondes Américains, coordonné par Manuel Covo, Céline Flory et Romy Sánchez. Cette séance est accueillie par le séminaire du CIRESC "Esclavage et post-esclavage : histoires, mobilisations et images dans le monde atlantique (XIXe-XXIe siècle)" et est réalisée avec le soutien du CERMA du laboratoire Mondes Américains et de l'Institut Des Amériques.