Tag: Frederick Luis Aldama

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Final Program for the Narrative Encounters Conference now online!

Please join us for our international online conference “Narrative Encounters with Ethnic American Literatures” from Sept. 2-4, 2021.

Taking a cue from pioneering efforts at the intersection of context-oriented approaches in race and ethnicity studies and post-classical narratology, this conference is interested in the relationship between narrative, race, and ethnicity in the United States.

Our distinguished keynote speakers are:

– Frederick Luis Aldama, University of Texas, Austin
– Paula Moya, Stanford University
– Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

The final program is available here.

Find out more on our conference website.

Interested colleagues and students can register for the conference here. There is no fee.

For inquiries, please contact Alexa Weik von Mossner at narrative.encounters@aau.at

The conference is supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) through the Narrative Encounters with Ethnic American Literatures Project

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Narrative Encounters Conference on September 2-4, 2021

Our international online conference “Narrative Encounters with Ethnic American Literatures” is coming closer.

Taking a cue from pioneering efforts at the intersection of context-oriented approaches in race and ethnicity studies and post-classical narratology, this conference is interested in the relationship between narrative, race, and ethnicity in the United States.

Reading so-called “ethnic” American literatures means encountering characters and storyworlds imagined by writers associated with various minority communities in the United States. Without doubt, the formal study of narrative can help us gain a deeper understanding of such encounters, but until recently, narratologists rarely grappled with the question of how issues of race and ethnicity force us to rethink the formal study of narrative.

Attesting that the relative “race/ethnicity-blindness” of narrative theory is a severe limitation, scholars such as James Donahue have called for a “critical race narratology” (2017, 3) that addresses this lacuna. A range of recent book publications (e.g. Aldama 2005; Donahue 2019; Donahue, Ho, and Morgan 2017; Fetta 2018; Gonzáles 2017; Kim 2013; Moya 2016; Setka 2020; Wyatt and George 2020) demonstrate that a variety of insights can be gained from narratological approaches that open themselves up to issues of race and ethnicity in conjunction with other important identity markers including class, religion, gender, and sexuality. And, as Sue Kim has noted, there are shared interests in understanding the ways in which such narratives “operate within larger social structures as well as an investment in the scrutiny of how minds and subjectivity work in and through narratives” (2017, 16).

How do ethnic American literary texts use narrative form to engage readers in issues related to race and ethnicity? What narrative strategies do they employ to interweave these issues with other important identity markers such as class, religion, gender, and sexuality? How do they involve readers emotionally in their storyworlds and how do they relate such involvements to the racial politics and history of the United States? And how does paying attention to the strategies and formal features of ethnic American literatures change our understanding of narrative theory? These are some of the questions we hope to address at this conference.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Frederick Luis Aldama, Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin

Paula Moya, Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities, Stanford University

Patrick Colm Hogan, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, University of Connecticut

The preliminary program for the conference is available here.

You can register for our online conference here. Registration is free of charge.

For any inquiries, please contact us at narrative.encounters@aau.at

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Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology forthcoming from Routledge

Photo Credit: Juan Alvarez-Ajamil

Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology, edited by the Narrative Encounters Team — Alexa Weik von Mossner, Marijana Mikić, and Mario Grill — is now under contract with Routledge for Chris Gonzáles’ Narrative Theory and Cultures series. Interrogating the relationship between narrative, race, and ethnicity in the United States, the volume includes chapters by Frederick Luis Aldama, Marlene Allen, James Donahue, Elizabeth Garcia, Jennifer Ho, Patrick Colm Hogan, Matthias Klestil, Derek Maus, Stella Setka, and W. Michelle Wang.

These contributions cover a wide range of primary texts — from historical novels and memoirs to speculative fiction, graphic novels, television and film — that belong to the literary traditions of Latinx, African American, Native American, Asian American, Jewish American, and Arab American communities. They interrogate the complex and varied ways in which ethnic American authors use narrative form to engage readers in issues related to race and ethnicity, along with other important identity markers such as class, religion, gender, and sexuality. The book also explores how paying attention to the formal features of ethnic American literatures changes our under­standing of narrative theory and how narrative theories can help us to think about the representation of time and space, the narration of trauma and other deeply emotional memories, and the importance of literary paratexts, genre structures, and author functions.

We’re very excited that we were able to attract such a fantastic group of scholars to our edited volume and can’t wait to see it in print!

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New Publication by Mario Grill on Guilt, Shame and Anger in Cherríe Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart

Mario Grill has published an article entitled “Guilt, shame, anger and the Chicana experience: Cherríe Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart as voice of resistance”. This article is part of a double special issue of Prose Studies, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Katlin Marisol Sweeney.

This article points towards a Latinx literary studies’ focus on nonfiction, more precisely on the affective and political function of the Chicana memoir. In this cognitive narratological analysis, Grill explores how mentally and emotionally sharing such narratives of resistance might decelerate the constant fueling of a system of intersectional racism. Considering both material and ideological moves to dehumanize Latinxs, this article argues how Cherríe Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart (2019) employs “emotionalizing strategies” to create a narrative of resistance against the colonialization of the mind through new conceptualizations of “empowering cultural imaginaries”.

Photo: Eugenio Mazzone

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How Reading Shapes Us: Frederick Luis Aldama

Try putting yourself in my place, the place I was in as a Latinx sophomore in high school when I experienced for the first time the “radioactive” shocks and revelations emitted by very well crafted novels and plays. A latch-key kid, I spent a lot of time at our local library. Fortunately, I became very good friends with a polymath librarian. She introduced me to all variety of wondrous storyworlds. They included, for instance, Yasunari Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness that dished up a poignant lesson in the aesthetics of objects and nature, as well as of love; I discovered the ludic play with identities in Luigi Pirandello’s novels and plays—among them The Late Mattia Pascal, One, None and a Hundred Thousand, Six Characters in Search of an Author. And, I found my way to Max Frisch’s mind-bending  I’m Not Stiller as well as Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s crime fiction. What really caught my mind and that became my steady diet were novels by African American authors such as Toni Morison, John Edgar Wideman, and Ishmael Reed; I was stunned by how each used radically different shaping devices to uncover the underbelly of a racist US society.  I can say for certain that it was Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo that lead me back in time to Rabelais and Swift; it was the fabulous wordsmith of written vernacular, John Edgar Wideman, that would find its way back in my life many years later as one of main sources of inspiration for the writing of my own book of fiction, Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands. 

It was in the space of the library filled with word-built storyworlds that I experienced the greatest shocks and revelations: my ecstatic reading of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel as art and genre became the most magic source of pure delight. It would resurface again and again in my work, and most centrally in my first scholarly work, Postethnic Narrative Criticism (2003).

As confirmed by Fernando del Paso’s Palinuro of Mexico, no literary invention, no image, no word, no sound, no subject is foreign to the novel, this most capacious of vehicles. So when in college I read Goethe’s pronouncements about local and  national literatures evolving within national boundaries while pointing to a future synthesis that gives birth to a world literature, I was more than ready to agree. Everywhere each author is unique, a real creator, a true maker of narrative wonders. But while each author in each country and language is an innovator in subject matter, and sometimes also with respect to storytelling instruments  or techniques, it is also true that authors enrich over time the content of their toolbox, adding to it the most precise and delicate instruments to better tell stories according to the dictates and dictations of their minds. It’s a planetary toolbox to which all writers pitch in and is always at their disposal, an ongoing process existing at least since Homer. And it is the content of this toolbox that has become the substance of global literature. Now, of course, it is the toolbox itself that comprises the discipline called “narratology.” 

As I mentioned, I started inhabiting the space of planetary literature years before I even knew the existence of such concept, not to speak of the term “narratology.” But at the same time my reading experience had been anything but parochial. So once again there was an openness on my part and a very intense curiosity.  

When I was an undergraduate at Berkeley and even more so as a graduate student at Stanford, I became extremely excited about Latinx literature and film and their study, but I also felt the pressing need to go to the roots, if they existed and had been scientifically studied, of the amazing phenomenon of  creativity: by what means in our possession as Latinxs and as human beings generally do we achieve the amazing feats of artistic creativity and scientific innovation. I wanted to understand better how is it that our brain has evolved the capacity to imagine, to sculpt a story initially formed in the mind, then to materialize it step by step, by trial and error, by frequent contrast between conception and provisional result, by a non-stop use of all intellectual and affective faculties, while the story is also being shaped by fingers typing or by writing done by hand or by vocal expression when dictating or simply testing the sound of the written word, as Flaubert famously did with all his texts in his gueuloir. Most often, films have a written support—a script—so this also applies to cinematographic creation which further includes the use of sound and cameras and many other things, and to the use of pencil and paper to geometrize narratives in the form of comics. 

How do we begin to get at an understanding of the foundations of creativity and storytelling? Well, first of all, cognitive science has made tremendous breakthroughs in this area; it’s no longer a largely speculative science with little empirical research and findings. On the contrary, it is now an exploratory and richly expansive science. The great advances in the neurosciences are helping the development of the subfield of neuro-aesthetics. Results based on verifiable research are allowing us to better understand how we create narratives and how our brains/minds work to step into storytelling schemas and then radically revise those schemas. Whether you are in a movie theater or home reading a novel or a comic book, it’s now possible to use non-invasive techniques to study what is going on in your brain. Acts of perception and the use of all our other senses can be studied to know how they reach such and such areas of the brain and are translated into both emotion and intellectual imaginative responses. 

Neurobiology is already a huge domain of knowledge and research, an enormous treasure trove of possible findings for the study of artistic creation in general and for literary and graphic books theory in particular. As far as narrative theory goes, well, already as an undergraduate at Berkeley I was drawn to courses taught by the remarkable narratologist, the late Seymour Chatman. Of course, these supplemented important courses on Chicanx—taught by professors Alfred Arteaga and Genaro Padilla—and African American literature—the late Professor Barbara Christian. As an undergraduate I found Chatman’s attention to story and discourse extremely important and suggestive; I also found Professor Robert Alter’s courses on style extremely productive. The tools and concepts of narrative theory allowed me to go beyond just character or thematic analysis. It allowed me to see not only how authors give respective shape to their Chicanx narratives but also how they build signposts into their fictions that, once the text is in the world, allow readers like myself to identify the cultural signifiers and thus be to a certain extent co-creators or co-authors of the text. 

Narrative theory continued to be an important part of my conceptual diet as I moved increasingly into the study of Latinx films and comic books. It continues to inform my writing and teaching, deepening an understanding of all of the shaping devices that are used by creators to make stories interesting, engaging, and alive. Narrative theorists over time have been able to refine and add to the kind of periodic table of shaping devices so that we can see better what is going on both in film, comic, and literature. It’s not surprising that I found myself gravitating toward narrative theory. It’s the natural space for a kind of analysis that I was hungry to use in my work and in my classrooms as a professor.

Frederick Luis Aldama

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Cognition and Chicanx Culture: An Interview with Frederick Luis Aldama- Part III

By Mario Grill

<Part II

Moving us Toward a Tomorrow

MG: Thank you for that very insightful response and you mention a lot that has diminished and discriminated certain communities. That is also something you argue in your Conversations on Cognitive Cultural Studies with Patrick Colm Hogan (2014). Both of you agree that such narratives depicting issues such as racism, sexism, and classism educate their readership to some extent as well instead of just being ‘the’ negative story that cannot be told because they contain several words or aspects that are highly questionable today. As I can tell so far, you would agree that this also holds true for Chicanx narratives. Is there a chance that those narratives enable readers to better understand those characters and cultures they encounter in these texts by looking at more perspectives than just the negative ones but also trying to see the bilingual aspect as something that is not just there for aesthetics?

FLA: This is another complicated question. When I wrote Long Stories Cut Short, I purposefully wrote it both in English and in Spanish and I worked with the press to make sure that they did not put walls up between the two. So, a flash fiction will appear in English and it will, without a page break, run right into the Spanish. You will still see the title of it in Spanish followed by the flash fiction in Spanish, but the two stories will run into each other. The typical bilingual move in a book is to have the story in Spanish on one page and the identical story translated into English on the opposite page as a kind of education tool.  That is not how we exist in this country as Latinxs. No matter what degree of fluency in Spanish or English, one way or another Latinxs in the US are surrounded by both. It is important that Long Stories Cut Short conveyed this linguistic hemispheric borderlands space. I think the closer we can get to the distillation and aesthetic reconstruction of what actually happens in our communities and in our families as Latinxs, the more enriching the experience will be for everybody.

As I mentioned before, creators can choose to create a storyworld to edify someone who does not know the experience; or they can choose to tell the best dang story about these sets of characters that are going to be as detailed and specific about their lives and their emotion systems, and their ethics that will create a rich story about this Chicanx family or protagonist etc. The latter option is where I would go. Like a García Márquez or a Faulkner or a Díaz, the more you go into the kind of depth and detail of a specific place, of a specific character and their movement within that storyworld space, it will eventually reach back out into a kind of connection with many, many people outside of that experience.

So yes, go deep into it and that includes language, that includes cultural references, it includes details all the way down to socks and shoes and the kinds of nails you use to build a house etc. Then it will reach back out to a general or more broad audience. If you start your creation thinking you want to appeal to everybody, it will likely fall flat. We see that with Hollywood movies all the time. They are factory-created, and they very often try to appeal to everybody out of the gate and they might entertain you for two hours while you are eating your popcorn, but you don’t go back to them. The ones that you go back to really understand and to experience again and again are the ones that deep-dive into the specificity of the human condition.

MG: The idea of going deep into the experience also brings me to my final question because you have hinted on several ideas that you deem important and that need to be further explored. There has been research on texts by Chicanx writers and there has been conducted from a cognitive cultural studies perspective, chiefly in your own work and also by other scholars such as Christopher González in his recent Permissible Narratives. The Promise of Latino/a Literature (2017). Are there any elements you would like to see explored in future research? Are there specific tropes and issues that need further investigation?

FLA: In addition to González’s book there are several others. I think of Ralph Rodriguez’s Latinx Literature Unbound (2018) and Ylce Irizarry’s Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction: The New Memory of Latinidad (2017). What I like about these books is that they move us toward a tomorrow in terms of what Latinx literature is doing and might be doing and why it might not be doing it, why authors might not be creating in the ways that we would hope they might be creating.

Let me be more specific: One thing that I have noticed in Chicanx Literature and also in all levels, from children’s literature all the way through adult literature, is that we do not have much of a tradition of fiction that calls attention to itself. We have People of Paper (Salvador Plascencia, 2006), Victuum (Isabella Rios, 1976), and a couple of Alejandro Morales’ novels like Waiting to Happen (2001) where there is experimental play. I just put together a volume of essays on Giannina Braschi’s work The United States of Banana (2011) and Yo-Yo Boing (2011). Braschi really pushes the envelope on storytelling by stretching our gap-filling capacities and immersing readers in Spanish and English for pages and pages. I would love to see more of that.

We are writing this fiction. It is just that publishers tend to impose straight-jackets on Latinx creators. They are like, “No, right now what is selling is like the ghetto narrative, now what is selling is the tortilla recipe story. So, unless you are going to write those, we are not interested in publishing you”. So, we go knocking door to door, hoping that someone will publish our work because it does not fit into these predetermined narrative molds. González’s notion of the permissible narrative captures this well. González also identifies a long tradition of outre Latinx authors who created “challenging narratives” who resist what is deemed permissible. I’d like to see our impermissible narratives get into the hands of readers. Until this happens, our sense of a Latinx creative futurity will be stalled.

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Cognition and Chicanx Culture: An Interview with Frederick Luis Aldama- Part II

By Mario Grill

< Part I

Identity and Borders

MG: When analyzing Coco or any Chicanx texts there’s the use of multiple languages and how this enriches Chicanx narratives in ways that we might not find in other ethnic American literatures. I’m thinking of how Chicanx narratives construct through and across Spanish and English double-identities. Along with this, do you believe that Chicanx fiction creators have aesthetic representational or political responsibilities (or opportunities) to inform readers from around the globe about the complexity of Chicanx cultural rituals, subjectivities, and experiences. Might this help shape and deepen non-Chicanx readers’ understanding of Latinidad in ways that push against negative and destructively stereotypical mainstream narratives of Chicanxs?

FLA: I think it is up to the individual Chicanx creator to decide how they want to use language to create their respective narrative fictions. Sometimes you see, especially with children’s literature by Latinx authors, where they are like: Okay, here is the story and because Spanish is so much a part of Latinx everyday life, they decide to reconstruct their narrative with codeswitching and interweaving Spanish in with the English. They decide to shape their narratives in and across translingual linguistic acts. However, even here we might see a publisher come down and say: “We want a glossary because want this book to appeal to more than just the Latinx families and kids”. So, they impose certain kinds of, say, discipline on a creator. So yes, there is all sorts of ways that Latinx creators use language to shape their narratives—along with an equal number of ways that these same creators can be constrained when publishers insist that they should create to educate general readers about our language and our culture in non-organic, say, ways to the narrative.

Now, there are authors, especially in the earlier moments of Chicanx literature, but we see it today, where the use of Spanish in the novel is immediately contextualized, so you understand if you are a non-Spanish speaker. A phrase will be mentioned in Spanish and then right next to it will be in English the narrator or the character indirectly defining what that phrase is. It is another form of glossary, but it indicates to readers like me that the ideal audience of the book might not be a Chicanx bilingual or codeswitching reader but maybe one that is dominant English or even to the point where they are monolingual English. So, there are all sorts of variations on this.

Ultimately, it is like such identity categories as Latinx or Chicanx or Blatinx or GuaMex-Irish (me)  where I am not going to ever say you should be calling yourself Latinx or Chicanx etc. It is up to you and how you want to self-identify. It is the same thing with literature, or any kind of creation. I am not going to say you need to have Spanish in there because that is a part of our culture and if we do not, we are going to be losing that. If you are a Chicanx author and if you want to write in dominant English or dominant Spanish or codeswitch or do a translingual creation, hey that is up to you.

I will say this, however. We are seeing more and more fiction coming out of the Latinx community of writers where it is the idea that Spanish or codeswitching is somehow a cultural marker as a thing of the past and now it is much more an aesthetic device. It is used as much as a shaping of the story in terms of a comma, syntax, word choice image as you have seen in English in the history of literature forever. Today we see Spanish codeswitching, translingual play as an important organic shaping device in the making of Latinx fiction. Junot Díaz’ Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao and my Long Stories Cut Short are really good examples of the use of translingual play as subtle markers of Latinidad and as powerfully generative shaping devices in terms of their aesthetics.

MG: Wouldn’t the exclusion of the bilingual create a sort of border? This is something you also argue in your recent Latinx Studies: The Key Concepts (2018) which you edited with Christopher Gonzáles. Here you discuss several different themes and areas connected to Latinx Studies and also highlight why Border Theory is so essential in every discussion on Latinx identity and also for Chicanx identity. For instance, you explain that “one key development in Border Theory is how an understanding of the border can lead to greater understanding of identity” (25). So both physical and mental borders in that way create something that established either distance or closure between people, communities, or even your readers. This is when you also mention that Border Theory’s “commitment to issues of the border, now an issue of incredible volatility thanks to the Trump administration’s dogged resolve to build a border wall, the vilification of undocumented Latinxs among rightwing politicos and politicians in the United States, the continued barriers to equal access to resources and due process for Latinxs, and the commitment by the Trump administration to pursue an anti-immigration, ‘America First’ agenda will ensure the vitality of this much-needed area of study.” (27). We see constantly the Trump administration’s villainization of US Latinxs and Mexicans. Do you think cognitive cultural studies can add to the pursuit of tearing down such imaginary and concrete walls and borders?

FLA: That is a pretty layered and complex question. Let me start by saying I never understood why the United States has been so aggressively anti-bilingualism. In our earlier talk I said it is up to the creator and it is but in terms of education of our children and children that become adults, this country, it should be like Québec or Switzerland or other countries around the world where you have two extremely significant languages operating on a daily basis. Why don’t we have Spanish on our cereal boxes alongside English? For everybody school from the very beginning should be, there should be Spanish and English and not just languages thrown at kids like in High School which is a disaster. Why is this? Because of course communication allows for understanding, allows for the movement and contact of people not based on fear but on comfort and from comfort can be learning and from learning can be creation. Yes, it is crazy that we live in a country that does not have every single sign on the street in Spanish and English and on our cereal boxes and in our schools and bilingual teachers trained.

MG: But it does happen in several cities or states?

FLA: Yes and especially in the Southwest, but not as a federal mandate. We should be able to flow between our languages in all national spaces. Not allowing for the growing of bilingualism everywhere and for everyone is like cutting off a limb.

Antibilingualism and specifically anti-Spanish has become part of the ideological trigger-space for “Make America Great Again” propaganda; this idea that somehow English is pure and the civilized language and using Spanish or “that Mexican” is dirty and evil, the latter of course also attaching itself to brown bodies in the US. This all plays in to Trump’s administration which is all about triggers and language and brown bodies and this idea of invading hordes and etc.

So yes, a borderland’s sensibility comes in and through language and culture and history—an understanding that we are connected to our brothers and sisters, our families, our communities, not only through language that reaches across borders, but also through shared histories of conquest and then survivance. There is a lot of communality between someone like me who is Guatemalan, Irish, and Mexican and someone who is who is Puerto Rican, or Cuban, or Dominican. Borderlands as a hemispheric space of coming together in healing along with the recognition of a shared wound: colonization.

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Cognition and Chicanx Culture: An Interview with Frederick Luis Aldama, Part I

Photo. Mario Grill

By Mario Grill

Frederick Luis Aldama is a cognitive cultural studies scholar and one of the leading figures in Latinx Studies. His work is therefore of central importance to our research at the Narrative Encounters Project.

Left; Mario Grill, Right; Frederick Luis Aldama

As Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor, he teaches Latinx literature, comics, film, and pop culture at The Ohio State University. He is also an affiliate faculty of the Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Brain Imaging as well as co-founder and core faculty member of OSU’s Project Narrative. He is the recipient of the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring as well as the Susan M. Hartmann Mentoring and Leadership Award and he is founder and director of the award winning outreach center at OSU, LASER: Latinx Space for Enrichment & Research. He is founder and co-director of Humanities & Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute. Togetherwith his brother, Arturo Aldama, and Patrick Colm Hogan, in 2005 he established the Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture series at the University of Texas Press; he currently continues to co-edit this as the Cognitive Approaches to Culture Series with Ohio State University Press. He is editor and coeditor of 8 additional academic press book series as well as editor of Latinographix, a trade-press series that publishes Latinx graphic fiction and nonfiction. He is the award-winning author, co-author, and editor of 36 books. In 2018, Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics won the International Latino Book Award and the Eisner Award for Best Scholarly Work. Aldama’s other book publications include: Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez (2009), Latino/a Literature in the Classroom: Twenty-first-century Approaches to Teaching (2015), The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Popular Culture (2016), and Latino/a Children’s and Young Adult Writers on the Art of Storytelling (2018). You can read more about his work and life here: www.professorlatinx.com

During a visit to The Ohio State University in April 2019, I had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Aldama. We spoke about his work as well as potential developments in cognitive literary studies focusing on Chicanx literature. Here is the first part of the interview. The second and third part will follow in separate posts.

Setting the Tone and Cognitive Cultural Studies

MG: In both your teaching and scholarship, you use narrative theory, cognitive science, and insights from Latinx and Latin American cultural theory. What would you say are some of the benefits of working on the intersection of these disciplines and cultures and how can such interdisciplinary cross-fertilization enrich our understandings of ‘the other’?

FLA: First, let me say thank you, Mario, for this interview and for clearing the space to talk about this. Okay, so something happened when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley that came into sharp focus as a graduate student at Stanford. I was extremely excited about Latinx literature and film and the study of it but I wanted to get at the kind of roots, the deeper, say, foundations of where creativity comes from: how we can create as Latinxs and as human beings generally. I wanted to understand better how is it that our brain has evolved the capacity to imagine, to sculpt a story imagined in the mind, then to realize materially this story either through typing of fingers to create words on a page, using sound and cameras to make a film, or using pencil and paper to geometrize narratives in the form of comics.

How do we begin to get at an understanding of the foundations of creativity and storytelling? Well, first of all, cognitive sciences has made tremendous breakthroughs in this area; it’s no longer a deterministic science. It is an exploratory and richly expansive science. The neurosciences, especially the subfield of neuro-aesthetics as informed by the advances in neurosciences, has been also extremely fruitful. With these research advances, we can understand better how we create and how our brains/minds work to step into storytelling schemas and then radically revise those schemas. Whether you are in a movie theater or reading a comic book, today we can better understand how perception and our senses translate information into both emotion and intellectual imaginative responses. To get at this knowledge foundation I had to go the sciences.

As far as narrative theory goes, well, already as an undergraduate at Berkeley I was drawn to courses taught by Seymour Chatman. Of course, these supplemented important courses on Chicanx (taught by professors Alfred Arteaga and Genaro Padilla) and African American literature (the late Professor Barbara Christian). As an undergraduate I found Chatman’s attention to story and discourse extremely generative; I also found Professor Robert Alter’s courses on style extremely productive. The tools and concepts of narrative theory allowed me to go beyond just character or thematic analysis. It allowed me to see not only how authors give respective shape to their Chicanx narratives but also how they build signposts into their fictions that, once the text is in the world, are co-constructed by readers like myself. Narrative theory continued to be an important part of my conceptual diet as I moved increasingly into the study of Latinx films and comic books. It continues to inform my writing and teaching, deepening an understanding of all of the shaping devices that are used by creators to make stories interesting, engaging, and alive. Narrative theorists over time have been able to refine and add to the kind of periodic table of shaping devices so that we can kind of see better what is going on both in film, comic, and literature. It’s not surprising that I found myself gravitating toward narrative theory. It’s the natural space for kind of analysis that I was hungry to use in my work and in my classrooms as a professor.

MG: You bring us to issues and debates regarding cognitive cultural studies. This approach is often criticized for focusing too narrowly on the interaction between a text and a single, highly abstract reader, neglecting the cultural and ethnic diversity of the actual audiences. What do you think of this critique and how would you argue against it since this is coming up again and again?

FLA: Anytime you mention “science” someone is going to have a quick knee-jerk reaction. For them, science is a stand-in for universals and essentialism that has been used to erase regional, ethnic, racial, gender, sexual differences. It will obliterate the intersectionalities and specificities that make up our vary varied human condition. With long histories of science being used to justify racism, sexism, and homophobia, believe me, I get it. Today, we’re seeing something new, as I already mentioned. We can go to the cognitive sciences to explore and enrich in non-deterministic ways. Indeed, these insights can bolster our positions against racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.

But let me take us to one of the deep reasons why I found my way to the cognitive sciences. I wanted to insert myself into the foundations of epistemological equations. The foundations that we have evolved as a species for thousands of years; foundations that have allowed us to create a multinetworked brain that allows our emotion system to interface with our prefrontal cortex when we create fiction, for instance. I am asking questions that are at the foundations—the roots, if you will—of who we are, how we are in the world, and how we create and transform the world.

Now, of course, these are going to express themselves uniquely, as uniquely as each of us are a unique person in this world. But if you start at the ends of the branches, your work will forever be infinite. It’s fine to work at the ends of the, say, many thousand branches that have grown from the roots, but one might never get at the foundations that I’m interested in knowing more about.

So, bottom-line is: Yes, we are all born with innate capacities for the growing of a language faculty (I am totally on board with Chomsky), long and short term memory processes, the growing of emotion systems and so on. And, yes, these innate capacities will grow in extraordinarily unique ways within specifics of time and place; they will grow into the many different personalities that make up the world. Those are definitively shaped by things like your race, your ethnicity, your gender, and as we grow and come into, our sexuality all of these things are going to inform and shape the kind of expression of this universal stuff that we all share.

MG: This means that you would also agree that fictional narratives invite our readers to step into the imaginary shoes of a character that is slightly or uniquely different from them and allows them to see what such a life may be like. Would you say that all ethnic American literary texts do so using the same methods? Or, are there distinct differences in how this happens, for instance, in Chicanx or Latinx literature to be more general?

FLA: Yes, you are right, I mean basically literature, film, comics all invite anybody to engage with them on a deep level: to co-create and co-imagine. Of course, different creators might have different ideal audiences in mind. With someone creating a specifically Chicanx comic book superhero, there are going to be elements that anybody can step into and understand and feel. There are also going to be, depending on the degree of will and specificity on the part of the creator, things that an outsider to Chicanx culture might not get. And, different creators decide if they will or how they will educate outsider readers.

Coco (2017) is a good example: It had a huge, deep, appeal with Chicanx and Mexican (in Mexico) communities and families. In fact the big numbers in terms of box office sales came from our communities. At the same time, it also appealed to many many non-Chicanx and Mexican audiences. When we create, we can make a narrative fiction we can have a singular, restrictive ideal audience in mind. We can also have multiple ideal audiences. And, at the end of the day, because we share common ground in terms of our faculty for imagining, feeling, and thinking, no matter if more restricted or expansive in terms of built-in ideal audiences, narrative fiction always opens its arms to everybody.

Part II >

Mario Grill