[Making and Faking the News] Truths Under the Carapace?: Historical Fact and Fiction, the Metahistorical Sublime and the Insane Rationality of the Bomb in Tangled Saviours: A Novel

Abstract

Inspired by several key concepts and conventions from the Marxist, post-structuralist, post-colonial and Annales schools of historiography and the attributes of what Amy J. Elias calls the "metahistorical romance", I want to argue that my novel Tangled Saviours, due to be published in December 2025, is a form of practice-based research that, using the broad palette of literary-fictional tropes and devices, can provide insights into the nonlinear, multiplicitous and dialectical nature of history, and into how historical events can be creatively and dramatically recreated in order to contest dominant Western narratives and epistemologies about the Second World War that are riven with distortions, fabrications and a susceptibility to what Alfred de Zayas calls “fake history”. Moreover, Tangled Saviours dissents from hegemonic trends in both historical fiction and historiography by exploring the interpellation of subaltern individuals and populations in Southeast Asian colonial and neo-colonial contexts, and ruminating on the “insane rationality” – to adapt a critical phrase from the philosopher Herbert Marcuse – of the Cold War nuclear age.