The works collected in this volume turn to the notion of the speculative as a site of resistance and hope, looking specifically to the potential of feminist worlds and modes of being to imagine alternatives to an unacceptable present, and to take actions that are oriented toward an as-yet unrealized future. At a time of intensified policing of, erasure of, and violence against gendered subjects and their bodies, we take heart in the words of contributing author Ki’en Debicki, who recently wrote, in correspondence, “Yes, we know this world will not do. . . . Let us gather up our words, re-remember our lost futures, and root deeply, together.”

Working through the strange temporalities of the “could have been” and the “not quite yet,” the works in this issue weave through the speculative potential of apocalypses and utopias; Afro- and Indigenous futurisms; performances and their remembered traces; embodied archives and practices of care. The excerpt from Joshua Whitehead’s novel‐in‐progress, The Stonewailers, offers us a glimpse of ishkwaakiiwan – the Anishinaabe conception of apocalypse – and reminds us, as does his accompanying essay “On Indigenous Joy and Futurisms,” that, in Indigenous epistemologies, every story of ruin contains within it a necropastoral grain of creation, rebirth, and flourish. Maria Hupfield’s visual folio draws on recent wearable sculptures and fashion editorial photographs from her striking Mashkiki is Movement project, gathering the “strength of the earth” to embolden new, fluid representations of Indigenous sovereignty with humour and insistence. Renee Gladman’s excerpt from her forthcoming novel Grasses – the latest in her Ravicka series – obfuscates the limits between textual, conceptual, and physical space, such that the sentences and paragraphs of collective history become winding hallways to wander.

The speculative also expresses itself in practices that are performed, embodied, and otherwise ephemeral. Christina Vega-Westhoff’s ekphrastic prose poems unfold in playful, high-velocity dialogue with feminist performance art. Aisha Sasha John’s all-caps verse boldly articulates refusal against the enclosures of gendered expectations. Eve Tagny’s choreographic gestures amass in moments of hardness and softness, collectivity and vulnerability, across a series of moving snapshots gathered from the image‐traces of her extensive site-specific performance practice.

Following the thread of performance, Carole Itter’s interview in this issue holds a special place, in that the theme of the speculative emerges from her own personal recollection of Helen Goodwin’s notable (and, at least to our knowledge, undocumented) 1965 “poppies” performance at the then newly inaugurated Simon Fraser University campus. Accompanying this interview, Itter’s art folio Selected (dissident) ceramics leans into the speculative as we are invited, alongside the artist, to imagine the personal contexts surrounding a lively cast of modest and highly imperfect handcrafted objects and the possible aspirations of their makers. Contra the Duchampian authority of the artist’s signature, Itter brings the art object into a broader, more collectively oriented ecology of production and reflection that includes her own carefully rendered pencil crayon drawings and “didactics.”

In conversation with Associate Editor Susan Blight for our Indigenous Places and Names series, Dr. Robin Gray writes of the powerful decolonizing potential of the “otherwise” to bring about new ways of seeing and being. “Ultimately, I think what folks like us are trying to get people to do is to imagine otherwise, right?” she says. “Decolonization is not just aspirational rhetoric. . . . It’s a movement dedicated to generating new possibilities, renewed relationships, and more egalitarian configurations of power.” Moving against the seemingly daily violences gathering with increasing speed and force all around us, words like Gray’s are a timely reminder and an even more urgent call to action: to use the tools we have, and to take seriously our collective aspirations. This issue is one small gesture towards this yet unrealized, but ever-unfolding, potential.

— Deanna Fong and Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross