“Frederick Aldama’s book seeks to transform the teaching of ethnic and
postcolonial literature. Fusing borderland and postcolonial fiction as constituent elements of Anglophone world literature, Aldama’s work flies in the face of conventional categories with energy and originality. Aldama’s embrace of human universals of language and emotion, his resistance to strictures of identity, his sensitivity to historical contexts of creation and reception, and his respect for the autonomy of fictional worlds establish the ethical power of borderland and postcolonial narrative. Yet Aldama argues that fiction should not be bent to the purposes of political argument at the cost of interfering with the invitation to intense empathetic response and the unleashing of readers’ world-creating imaginations. He rescues for literary study and for the humanities a core purpose of narrative world-making: the safe experiment with volatile materials.”
—Suzanne Keen, Washington and Lee University, author of Empathy and the Novel

“In Aldama’s eloquent exploration of postcolonial and Latino fiction—novel, short story, comic book—we find concepts, arguments, and  analyses that increase our pleasure as readers of Zadie Smith, Arundhati  Roy, Hari Kunzru, Amitav Ghosh, Dagoberto Gilb, Luis Rodriguez and a whole lot of comic book authors—finally!—that lead us to know and inhabit new intellectual territories. This book is for all authors, readers, and critics interested in postcolonial and Latino fiction and, most significantly, it is a daring journey into the Latino and postcolonial fictional mind.”
—Monica Brown, Northern Arizona University, author of Gang Nation: Delinquent Citizens in Puerto Rican, Chicano, and Chicana Narratives

2009

“‘Holy funny pages, Batman!’ Fred Aldama’s Your Brain on Latino Comics tears open new tierra as its savvy x-ray vision parses Latino visual culture. With voracious eyes attuned to word-image conspiracies, grandmaster Aldama’s ink-stained hands reveal the legacy and destiny of ‘American’ comics. This is a go-to book for profs in ethnic/cultural studies and communications. Jump into a phone booth and reach for your hot spandex tights—Aldama’s lush, semiotic alchemy will have you leaping buildings in a single bound!”
—William A. Nericcio, Chair, English and Comparative Literature, San Diego State University; Visiting Professor, Media and Cultural Studies, University of California, Riverside

“Your Brain on Latino Comics/ is a much-needed addition to the field of Latino studies, serving as a bridge between a rich Latino comics history that has been paid little scholarly attention in the past and a thriving contemporary Latino literary culture that was widely influenced by Latino comics like Love & Rockets."
—Eric Reynolds, Editor, Fantagraphics Books

• Hot off the Press: Your Brain on Latino Comics Book
• Aldama Book Signing Podcast [MP3]

Forthcoming
2010

This highly impressive collection of essays features stimulating and cutting-edge research by some of the best people working in the new and important field of cognitive narratology. It shows beyond doubt that the cognitive sciences can shed significant light on the processes involved in our understanding of narratives in various media.
—Alan Palmer, independent scholar and author of the award-winning Fictional Minds

Bringing both theory and application to bear on cognitive approaches to literary narrative, Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts offers wide-ranging discussions using research apparatuses—critical, historical, and scientific—on the cutting edge of today’s multidisciplinary studies. This volume posits useful terms for the erasure of some traditional boundaries that have determined and indeed restricted inquiry. In their place, it suggests empowering new models with which to figure the complex relationships between humanistic and scientific ways of knowing. Essays by Lindenberger, Priborkin, Zunshine, Abbott, Hogan, and Pandit-Hogan make particularly refreshing statements at these disciplinary cross-sections.

—F. Elizabeth Hart, Associate Professor, University of Connecticut, co-editor of Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn

"This is one of the most versatile, colloquially written, and philosophically astute readings of the American politics of race and the university that one can find anywhere. In the name of a 'new humanism' based on struggle, Aldama draws (at times humorously) on his experiences as a teacher to give a persuasive account of the self based (of all things) on neuroscience and evolutionary biology. An exciting book."

—Timothy Brennan, Professor, Departments of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, and English, University of Minnesota

"In his wide-ranging new study, Frederick Aldama is ahead of the curve, ratcheting up the kind of synthetic, interdisciplinary work one finds in writers like Frans de Waal, Patrick Colm Hogan, Andy Clark, and Susan Oyama to a vision of the humanities itself as a field permeated everywhere by scientific insight. In this, Aldama energetically pursues what E. O. Wilson called 'consilience,' but at its broadest level and with a respect both for scientific reductionism and for its limitations at this level of complexity."

—Porter Abbott, Research Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara

"In this exciting new book, Frederick Luis Aldama has done an outstanding job of remapping 'magical realism.'"

—Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of Afro-American Studies, Harvard University

"This book is very much poised at the end of recent thinking and oriented toward the future. . .The work is new and incisive in its scope: it is at once a thorough reading of the relevant and major literary works in a reading of film. . .A very smart endeavor."
—Alfred Arteaga, Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley

This is a most absorbing book, for the authors interviewed here perform as live and also quite lively voices, inviting the reader to sample their art.... The book succeeds in defining the achievement of a significant literary generation."

—Herbert S. Lindenberger, Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities in Comparative Literature and English, Emeritus, Stanford University

"Aldama has effectively rewritten the standard for conducting interviews. While all his authors are deeply interesting, what's wonderful is how each interview develops in its own unique way. It's quite clear that Aldama is asking the questions, but he's also responding to the answers. As a result, all the interviews make for great reading."

—José F. Aranda Jr., Associate Professor of English, Rice University