Spencer Tricker’s Imminent Communities: Transpacific Literary Form and Racialization, 1847-1920 offers a compelling new understanding of the role of the Pacific in the development of U.S. imperialism in the long nineteenth century. Weaving together evidence from literature, political history, and popular periodicals, Tricker shows how conceptions of U.S. Pacific ascendancy depended on a discourse of what he calls “Pacific imminence,” a way of thinking of transpacific power driven by a conception of future time. Global prosperity and cosmopolitan transoceanic communities, according to this framework, were envisioned as always about to emerge. Revealing the Pacific’s central role in the project of American empire-building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this original conception of “Pacific imminence” makes visible how the transpacific paradigm transformed the ways of thinking about frontiers earlier elaborated by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Through close analysis of the period’s literature and politics, “Imminent Communities” ultimately shows how both American and East Asian writers were able to use the resources of fiction to resist this discourse and to conjure alternate forms of cosmopolitanism and community.