Our Future Present(s)

Futurity is tied to questions of liability and responsibility, to attentiveness to one’s own lingering pains and to the sorrow and agonies of others. Futurity marks literature’s ability to raise, via engagement with the past, political and ethical dilemmas crucial for the human future.

— Amir Eshel, Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past

As we were assembling this one hundredth issue, in which we were trying to envision the future from a non-dystopic angle or one marked by a more optimistic vision, the present was confining us by an unprecedented health crisis. Concurrently, this same present continued to be a site for racism that remains deeply rooted in society and that has led to the brutal death of many Black and Indigenous people in Canada and the United States. Ahmaud Arbery, shot and killed on February 23 near Brunswick, Breonna Taylor, shot and killed on March 13 in Louisville, George Floyd, killed by asphyxiation on May 25 in Minneapolis, Regis Korchinski- Paquet, died under suspicious circumstances on May 27 in Toronto, Chantel Moore, shot and killed on June 4 in Edmunston, Rodney Levi, shot and killed on June 12 in Metepenagiag, and Rayshard Brooks, shot and killed on June 12 in Atlanta, join the too-long list of victims by law enforcement officers in North America and elsewhere in the world. Yet many people, including leaders, shamelessly continue to claim that systemic racism and state violence do not exist or are merely exceptional.¹ 1 - On this subject: Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to Present(Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2017)..