Arai Ōsui and the Transnational Reimagination of Civilization in the Late Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract Civilization discourse hierarchically ordered nation-states and people of different traits, including race and gender, in the Western modern concept of progress. This civilizational ideology of modern nation-states has underpinned narratives of many historical works, including transnational historical studies. This article showcases the ideas and practices of transnationalism that challenged such civilization discourse and pursued a more egalitarian and mutually interdependent vision of the world at the non-state level. This article does so by focusing on the Brotherhood of the New Life, a mixed-race religious agricultural community in late nineteenth-century rural America, and one of its Japanese members, Arai Ōsui, who joined the community after his defeat in Japan's Boshin Civil War. I argue that this non-state transnational perspective illuminates the Brotherhood members’ endeavour to free gender and race – the key conceptual underpinnings of the ideology of civilization – from this very discourse. This article further reveals, through Ōsui, that the community's egalitarian ethos developed to instigate new, anti-imperialist, and anti-hierarchical thoughts and actions in early twentieth-century Japan, in opposition to the state's imperialist endeavour to progress.