Future tense: the potentiality of Ecuadorian literature against the canon

This essay argues that one of the most influential Latin American and Ecuadorian literary properties is related to the concept of time and its relationship to tradition. The hierarchical control and monopolization of temporality needs to shift its gaze towards futurity as a means to contemplate differences in the political, national and aesthetic matrixes, which do not resonate with traditional discourses of power. The methodology comes from the notion of futurability (Berardi) within the framework of foundational fictions of Latin America. It is also tied to a particular concept of modernity defined through the passage of time (Latour), allowing to understand how the literature of Latin America permeated by the temporal range can be potentiated towards "becoming." Ranciere writes that within the distribution of the sensible there are categories of time that are crucial when thinking about literature (9-10). I argue that present time allows or prohibits a type of future and in this exercise arbitrarily establishes a hierarchy of texts, creating a false need for "masterpieces." Our ethical task is to resist the past and imagine another future, one in which this idea of necessity is reorganized to redistribute "the weights on the [sensible] scale" (Ranciere 26). The article mentions two authors that attempt to adhere to the future possibility of twisting the Ecuadorian canon towards a desirable literarty future: Salvador Izquierdo (1980) and Daniela Alcivar (1982). In part, this study tries to reflect on the modes of operation of national literature discourse within "small literatures", as Ecuadorian literature is usually considered, using the format of the Latin American literary essay.