‘If I were at peace, I wouldn’t be here’: Staging incarceration’s transgenerational, transnational ghosts and memory in Jay Kuo’s Allegiance

While a majority of the Second World War-based musicals tend to glorify America’s heroism and downplay or ignore its injustices, Jay Kuo’s (2015) musical Allegiance centres on the unlawful incarceration of over one hundred and twenty thousand Japanese American civilians held in American concentration camps during the war, which is a history that many Americans continue not to be aware of. Through foregrounding Jessica Nakamura’s framework of response-ability, this article considers the ways Allegiance activates it, through the use of spectral embodiment as a means to engage ghosts of Japanese diasporic war memory, especially as it relates to the portrayal of the historical figure Mike Masaoka and a staging of the Hiroshima bombing. Allegiance ’s staging of ghosts is similarly interrogated within a musical where unsettled personal trauma conjures ghosts of the past that must be settled by characters like the protagonist, Sammy Kimura, who enters a dialogic relationship with them. Through analysing press materials, onstage performances, interviews and documentary content, this article highlights how transnational connections and transgenerational response-ability are staged to help cope with and remember Japanese and Japanese American experiences. It similarly discusses how the musical form aided and inhibited the show’s meaning to and resonance with audiences throughout Allegiance ’s production history. Through settling and unsettling the dead, this article considers how Allegiance enshrines personal, communal and national memories about wartime incarceration into a piece of art that serves educational and reparative purposes for the production companies and audiences who experienced the show on and off-Broadway.