Monica Brown
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
Suzanne Keen
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
