Literature Salon Presents

The Time of Anger: Lament as Manifesto in Aimé Césaire's "For an Assassinated Striker"

In rural Martinique in 1948, three striking workers were ambushed and killed by gendarmes when they came to collect their wages. In response to these events, Martinican poet and politician, Aimé Césaire, published a short pamphlet entitled "For an Assassinated Striker," containing two original poems. This paper offers a reading of this pamphlet, considering how the poetry it contains moves from elegy or lament to manifesto, mobilizing the deaths of these men as part of a vision of decolonization that is linked to labour struggles and the intimate relationship between work and the land for agricultural workers.

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Time: 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Olin Humanities, Room 203

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