“The Camps Go Mainstream”: l’internamento dei nippoamericani in Perfidia e This Storm di James Ellroy e in Bombshells United di Marguerite Bennett

The essay focuses on the choices made by James Ellroy in his novels Perfidia (Alfred A. Knopf 2014) and This Storm (Alfred A. Knopf 2019), and by Marguerite Bennett in the superhero comics series Bombshells United (DC Comics 2018-2019) in terms of representation of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. More specifically, the essay points out how the two authors respectively re-evoke, in their fictional works, the Japanese American incarceration and the context in which it took place by revising the historical facts to suit their artistic needs, and how such representations can impact contemporary readers who often learn for the first time about this tragic historical event through mainstream products such as Ellroy’s and Bennett’s works.