Bringing together theoretical and methodological resources, as well as concerns, from Asian area studies, comparative literature, modernist studies, American ethnic studies (most especially Asian American studies), and postcolonial studies, transpacific literary and cultural studies encompasses in its general scope the different nations, peoples, and cultural traditions making up the Pacific Rim region, with a particular focus on examining the diverse material and conceptual roles that they (or ideas about them) have played both in the very constitution of western modernity and in its subsequent global spread. This essay offers a brief genealogy of this emergent scholarly formation and discusses recent scholarship that seeks to chart the reciprocal interactions and tensions among the intertwined domains of Pacific Rim geopolitics, cultural production (especially poetry), and racialization that have underwritten and accompanied the rise of Euro-American modernity and its unevenly contested effort to shape the rest of the world according to its own image.