By interpreting the Pacific Rim as a unified region binding together the territorial US with the areas of Asia and the Pacific, Eperjesi shows that the logic of the imperialist imaginary suggested it was not only suitable but even crucial that the United States to exercise both political and economic influence in the area. Eperjesi uses a Marxist based Frankfurt School approach to inform his argument that the "Pacific" did not exist in the West (or for that matter in the American mind) until the late 19th century or the American Age of imperialism. According to Eperjesi, scholars did not fully understand American Orientalism because of their historically shallow perspective and inability to connect culture and economics.

In a work defined as "New Americanist," Eperjesi, in The Imperialist Imaginary, investigates the cultural and economic creation of the US relationship to China and the Pacific Rim in the 19th and 20th centuries. Eperjesi looks at a myriad of texts to (re)define or (re)orient the emergence of what Rob Wilson called the "American Pacific." Eperjesi shows how works ranging from Frank Norris' The Octopus to the Journal of the American Asiatic Association, from the Socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason to the travel writings of Jack and Charmain London. He continues with Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men to Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Eperjesi looks at the cultural dynamics that produced these texts and how these texts worked to construct the myth of the American Pacific.