This special forum of JTAS brings together the work of international scholars from the fields of archipelagic American studies, island studies, and mobility studies. It is the result of two thematic workshops in Leipzig, Germany organized by the collaborative research center "Spatialization Processes under the Global Condition" and the Vienna research platform "Mobile Cultures and Societies" that set out to investigate the relationship between transnational studies, archipelagic studies, and mobility studies. In seven articles, an interview, and an exploratory conversation, the twelve contributors open up and navigate new paths of thinking through the intersections of archipelagicity, mobility, US-American imperialism, and decoloniality. As part of a rising tide of critical voices that express discontent about global neoliberal regimes of im/mobility and their representation, the contributors concurrently identify and answer to contemporary needs of renegotiating spaces, places, identities, and power relations. Archipelagic epistemes, the authors demonstrate across a diverse range of topics, provide a lens through which to critically interrogate traditional binaries of continentalism and islandness. They challenge colonial discourses of static, self-contained islands and bring into focus the role of im/mobilities and relational entanglements.As Édouard Glissant noted in his conversations with Hans Ulrich Obrist, archipelagos "are spaces of relation that recognize all the infinite details of the real. …They open us up to a sea of wandering: to ambiguity, to fragility, to drifting." 1 The contributions to this special forum operate within that "sea of wandering" as they open into and move across varied literal and figurative archipelagos; they demonstrate how transnational imaginaries and discourses become part of archipelagic formations, both in contexts of imperialism and resistance to its dominant epistemes. Significantly, arch-

In his youth, Richard Henry Dana Jr. rebelled against the conventions of his upper-class New England upbringing when he signed on as a common sailor on a merchant ship bound for Alta California. The notes of his travels describe the strenuous life at sea, a captain’s sadistic streak, a crew’s mutinous tendencies, and California’s multicultural fur trade economy. First published in 1840, Dana’s travelogue Two Years Before the Mast became an unofficial guide for emigrants traversing the largely unmapped far western territories in the wake of the Mexican-American War. Connecting Dana’s widely-read narrative to current developments in the discipline, this article discusses strategies of visualizing literature and includes an exercise in ‘discursively mapping’ actual and imagined spaces and mobilities of the text. Considering strategies and toolsets from the digital humanities as well as theories such as Lefebvre’s concept of representational space, the article reflects on the methodological and practical pitfalls brought about by the visualization.

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The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.--Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations" What Joseph Campbell in his classical study calls the "monomyth" is, as psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés notes, a meta-narrative that "informs and […] spiritually grows the cultures, and the peoples within those cultures, through its universal cache of idioms and images." 1 Acknowledging that human placemaking, meaning-making, and storytelling rely on mental mapping and mapmaking, this essay expands the scrutiny of narrative structures of placemaking towards the realms of spatial imaginations, human geographies, and transnational cartographic practices of mobility. Tracing both colonial and anti-colonial nodes of these practices across oceanic circuits makes visible what Albert Wendt described as "so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature." 2 What emerges is, I suggest, an archipelagic cartography that opens new venues for critical reconceptualizations of islands, mainlands, centers, peripheries, colonial histories, and transnational future trajectories.Be it through gesturing directions, drawings in the sand or stick figures, the urge to conceive maps is perhaps as old as humanity itself. Embellishing the depths of ancient caves in northern France, some of the earliest-known maps in fact do not partition the surface of the earth but trace constellations of the night sky. Knowing little about their creators, we may nevertheless assume that they, like all following generations, looked beyond terrestrial borderings in search of meaning, connection, and transcendence. Much like modern maps, these first known cartographic specimen embed spatial symbols within networks of meaning. They construct, communicate, and naturalize spatial imaginations by imparting them with stability and authority. In this sense, all maps are acts of poiesis through which people engender spatial meaning

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