The Greatest Films.

摘要

"The Greatest Films" is a poetry manuscript accompanied by a critical essay that explores Indo-Guyanese-Canadian subjectivity in the late 1970s. The poems address themes of cultural hybridity as they are fomented through passages between real and imagined homelands and hostlands. The manuscript employs disjunctive poetic techniques that exteriorize histories of Indo-Guyanese-Canadian cultural and ethnic dispersal and encampment. While by no means an exhaustive list of sources, "The Greatest Films" assembles poems from timelines, cinematic language, letters, lyrical flourishes, oral histories, and world literature. "The Greatest Films" revivifies these sources into repeating lines of verse that pulls readers back-and-forth from the left to right margin with tentative stops in the centre of the page. Regardless of which direction the poems pull readers towards, what always awaits them is an encounter with the residual nostalgia for 'origins' activated by narrative fragments of embroidered ancestral memory before---and distant from--Guyana and Canada.