DR Apr-14

In September 2023, Linda Coombs published Colonization and the Wampanoag Story with Penguin Random House, a work narrating the Wampanoag people’s early encounters with European colonizers. Though designated ‘children’s nonfiction’, it was subsequently, in 2024, reclassified as ‘fiction’ by a citizen committee in Montgomery County, Texas—ironically composed without a single librarian. Following intense national and international backlash, the Montgomery County Commission reversed the categorization on 22 October 2024, reinstating the work as ‘nonfiction’. This semantic tug-of-war over genre reveals a deeper, politically charged intention: to call a book ‘fiction’ in this context was to dismiss its contents as untrue, thus discrediting a particular historical narrative at odds with dominant cultural self-perceptions.

This act of recategorization underscores the ideological power embedded in the labels ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’. To relegate something to ‘fiction’ is to signal its imagined, inauthentic, or fabricated nature. Consider how Johnny Depp, at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, described the media coverage about him as “fantastically, horrifically written fiction”—a strategic deployment of ‘fiction’ as a synonym for ‘lies’. Similarly, Shakeel Hashim’s assertion that Meta’s AI safeguards are an “elaborate fiction” reveals the rhetorical use of the term to imply unreality or artifice. These examples illustrate how such labels shape cognitive boundaries about what is to be believed and what dismissed.

Yet, equating fiction with falsity is philosophically naive. Fiction and lies are not interchangeable. A lie is a deliberate attempt to deceive by presenting falsehood as truth. Fiction, conversely, often entails no such deception—it may even depict exclusively real events, as Helen Garner’s The Spare Room (2008) does. Conversely, nonfiction works may contain errors, outdated science, or unverifiable claims, and yet remain nonfiction by virtue of the author’s intent and belief in their truthfulness. Hence, it is the sincerity of belief—rather than the veracity of content—that demarcates nonfiction.

Indeed, the epistemological foundations of nonfiction rest not on correspondence with absolute truth, but on a belief structure shared between writer and reader. Jane Heal, in The Disinterested Search for Truth (1988), argues that truth in itself is rarely the motive for intellectual inquiry. We pursue truths selectively, governed by relevance to our conceptual or practical projects. Thus, nonfiction matters not because it is categorically true, but because it contributes meaningfully to the interpretative structures through which we understand ourselves and our world. The Montgomery County Commission’s intervention was not a dispassionate evaluation of epistemic reliability across the nonfiction corpus. It was a targeted action against a work whose “truth” disrupted entrenched narratives of national identity.

The distinction between fiction and nonfiction is historically and culturally contingent. In early analytic philosophy, fiction became a proving ground for theories of meaning and reference. Alexius Meinong’s separation of ‘being’ from ‘existence’, and Frege’s notion of ‘sense’ and ‘reference’, were responses to the ontological challenge posed by fictional entities. More recent philosophical accounts—David Lewis’s possible world theory, Walton’s concept of make-believe, Currie’s and Stock’s emphasis on imaginative intention—further develop fiction’s definition using the tools of metaphysics and philosophy of mind. These diverse approaches reveal that fiction is not merely the opposite of truth but a reflection of how communities conceptualize reality.

This contest over classification is more than academic. It demonstrates how our notions of fiction and nonfiction are tethered to ideological investments, which in turn dictate the borders of public knowledge. The fate of Coombs’s book exemplifies not only the precariousness of historical truth but the malleability of genre itself as a site of political struggle.

Word Count: 592
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 18
Difficult Word Meanings (Selected):

• Undergirded: supported or formed the basis for

• Euphemism: a mild or indirect word substituted for one considered harsh

• Facticity: the quality or condition of being a fact

• Disinterested: impartial, not influenced by personal feelings

• Referent: the actual thing or object a word refers to

• Metaphysics: branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of existence

• Prescribe: to lay down a rule or guide

• Freakish: very unusual or unexpected

• Ontology: philosophical study of the nature of being

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