This essay brings together Goethe and the US-American project of westward expansion to further complicate our understanding of world literature. Against the backdrop of the German writer’s famous introduction of the trope of world literature, Keppler-Tasaki focuses on such different writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Mann, Ferdinand Grautoff, Oswald Spengler, and Alfred Döblin. His discussion sheds new light on competing transatlantic imaginations of the Pacific (and, more specifically, the ocean-linking construction of the Panama Canal) as a site of historical and global literary significance. Much of this, Keppler-Tasaki argues, unfolds in fictional apprehension of a paradigmatic conflict between European empires and the exoticised Other in and beyond the Pacific, so that world literature becomes a cultural practice in and through which hegemonic notions of white supremacy and imperial subjugation are either being promoted or contested.