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Rather than idealizing the future, the term "utopian longing" in my title refers to making the future happen by helping conceptualize the possible. I use the notion of "utopia" broadly in the sense that Ernst Bloch explained in The Principle of Hope (and The Spirit of Utopia) to mean social imagining, educated hope, and concrete or possible versus abstract utopias, and the temporally layered experience of hope in which we encounter both our individual and collective selves in a "dreaming forward" that encompasses the past, the present, and the future. The way we imagine Canadian Literature, both the field and the journal, depends upon what we conceive of as possible, particularly in terms of feminist and everyday notions of cultural transformation and particularly in terms of two of the most enduring sources of conflict and social injustice in our society. The first is contemporary and global forms of class exploitation, what Arjun Appadurai calls econocide: "a worldwide tendency to arrange the disappearance of the losers in the great drama of globalization" (41). The other is linguistic conflict, characteristic of our two solitudes in Canada. Briefly, what worries me is that imagining the future for many of us in this place and time will be truncated by our experience of extreme precariousness, which keeps the poor focused on making a living and keeps the privileged focused on short-term profit rather than long-term responsibility for the future (see Ireland). In the field of literary criticism specifically, I fear this means that we may have lost touch with how to read literature in terms of radical politics because so many of us are involved in careerism (publish or perish) or merely stuck in a pervasive form of presentism, which stems from what David Harvey calls "the nirvana of consumerism," not to mention a flight from economism so pervasive that we neglect to factor in a critique of class and economic forces when we discuss contemporary culture. This, as both Harvey and Ireland note, makes us, as academics, shy to critique capitalism. As the gap between the rich and the poor widens, we lack reading strategies to understand the structures of feeling of the oppressed and to imagine a future resistant to, or even critical of, capitalism. Present economic...