Writing of the Pacific in 1870, Walt Whitman proclaimed that the U.S. was "destined to the mastership of that sea and its countless paradises of islands." While the touchstone year of U.S. Imperialism in that hemisphere remains 1898, literary representations of the Pacific and its peoples are present throughout the long nineteenth century. Beginning with early travelogues by Amasa Delano and Charles Wilkes, through the publication of novels such as James Fenimore Cooper's The Crater (1847) and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), and culminating in such discrepant works as Richard Harding Davis's imperial romance Soldiers of Fortune (1897) and Mark Twain's anti-imperialist essay "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" (1901), narratives of a once mysterious Pacific increasingly entered into American literary, commercial, and political discourses. Combined with literary works by Asian Americans of the early twentieth century (e.g. Sui Sin Far, Onoto Watanna, and Yone Noguchi), this archive has lately become the subject of a resurgent body of scholarship on U.S. imperialism, comparative racialization, and literary form. This panel responds to these topics and related issues in order to provide a fuller account of Pacific spaces and peoples in the nineteenth-century U.S. literary imagination. Please send 250-word proposals and a brief bio to Spencer Tricker (s.tricker@umiami.edu) by January 22nd, 2016.