Introduction: Conceptualizing Archipelagic Mobilities

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 rela - tionship 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 archipel-agicity, 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 continen-talism 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, archi-pelagos “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-Wöll