Herman Melville’s Mardi emerges as a pivotal work that bridges the domains of narrative realism and philosophical allegory, reflecting the writer’s evolving artistic ambitions and his quest for truth. This article
examines Melville’s exploration of the poet’s role and literature’s potential as a medium for conveying profound philosophical insights. Drawing on Agnes D. Cannon’s critical framework and Melville’s marginalia, 
the analysis highlights how the writer constructs a multidimensional vision of the artist as entertainer, mouthpiece, interpreter, visionary, savior, and mythmaker. Melville’s poetic philosophy integrates Romantic notions of art’s transformative power with a critical stance on truth, emphasizing the poet’s duty to grapple with both beauty and the sublime while navigating the moral and existential ambiguities of human existence.
By reimagining narrative as an epistemological journey, Melville challenges his contemporaries’ aesthetic expectations and affirms literature’s capacity to inspire intellectual and spiritual growth. This article situates Mardi within 19th-century debates on aesthetics and truth, shedding light on Melville’s literary aspirations and his enduring contributions to the philosophy of art.

Hemispheric and transoceanic narratives of American travels originated amidst an almost infinite, multidirectional, transoceanic mobility of people, goods, and lifestyles. Such multiplicity, impossible to reduce to a few organizing principles, defies confinement within any single explanatory framework. To meet this challenge, therefore, we open RIAS to this abundance, taking a step toward the decolonization of the narrative(s) of hemispheric and transoceanic American travels and of thereto related research. Embracing the non-homogeneity of the plethora of the scattered, and sometimes incoherent narratives—whose functions (and functionalizations) change, and whose perspectives vary—we emphasize the polyphony of voices. To decolonize such a multifaceted discourse, in this issue of RIAS we gathered articles which decentralize the conceptualization of travel narratives as necessarily bound with the idea of representation, disentangle the intertwined perspectives from which transoceanic narratives emerge and answer again to the question what it means to travel.

The almost century-long system of Indian indenture (1830–1920) initiated by the British after the abolishment of slavery in 1833 displaced 1.3 million Indians who were taken as cheap contract labor to work on the plantation colonies of the Empire. This paper will draw focus on the voyage undertaken by the indentured Indians across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans to the British plantation colonies in the Caribbean. It will deconstruct certain stereotypes and myths about the journey on the ships across the Kala pani (black waters of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans) that have for long been reproduced in the earlier literature written on indenture. The journey of the indentured Indians to the Promised Land, towards the American continent, was paradoxically not for adventure, or for a religious cause, or even to pursue a dream, but was, quite simply, a means to an end. The ship, and by extension, the voyage, would become the site of their coming together, and it is from the ships that would emerge the narratives of their origin. Through a growing body of work across diverse genres of poetry, fiction and prose, the succeeding generations of the indentured people have been engaged in interrogating and reclaiming the indenture experience of their forbears in order to mine the legacies of indenture. This paper will take a closer look at select narratives documenting the invisible and unvoiced ‘her’stories to reveal the several paradoxes surrounding the experience of the transoceanic voyage in indenture.

In 1885 Lieutenant Colonel Forrester explores the newly acquired territory of Alaska for the US government. His passion to see an unknown world clashes with the mission Forrester has received from his military superiors.
How will he meet the dual challenge—as well as the moral dilemma—of navigating an older world that resists comprehension—a world he learns to respect—and mapping the terrain for potential military invasion?
My analysis will thus attempt to foreground the manifold paradoxes of travel/narratives. Loosely based on Lieutenant Henry Tureman Allen’s historic exploration of the Tanana and Copper rivers, Ivey’s novel departs significantly from historical accuracy in order to bring the colonizing agenda of the government-sponsored exploration party into conversation with the individual perspectives and sensibilities of its members, exposed as they are to a world where old stories are alive and where nonhumans or not-quite humans are all agential
beings. Employing anthropologist Viveiros de Castro’s theorization of Amerindian perspectivism, I want to argue that To the Bright Edge of the World decolonizes the genre of travel narratives as well as the experience of travelling between worlds.

Indigenous Peoples have expressed, remembered, and performed spatial orientation, imaginations, and relations as part of their various movements across Turtle Island (the North American continent according to some Indigenous Nation’s creation stories), including migration, trading, hunting, gathering, and also the forced displacement of Indigenous Peoples from their ancestral lands to reserves. Gwilym Lucas Eades’ (2016) research demonstrates how Indigenous communities understand spatial imagination and use maps and digital media to express their cultural identity, reclaim land and assert their sovereignty, tell stories, transmit cultural knowledge, and counter colonial narratives through counter-mapping showing the essence of one’s spatial awareness. In the context of this study, I understand counter-mapping as a form of activism against dominant power structures to restore the voices and perspectives of Indigenous nations that oppose Western notions of place and spatial imagination and question the arbitrarily imposed by colonization borders between different areas on earth, between people and between nature and man. This paper explores three different forms of walking experiences as Indigenous counter-mapping practices. The protest walk initiated by David Kawapit, known as the Journey of Nishiyuu or the Journey of the People, a 1,600-kilometer journey of a group of young Cree walkers from Whapmagoostui, Quebec to Parliament Hill in Ottawa to support the Idle no More movement marks a contemporary activist expression of embodied mapping through journeying. The traveling art installation project Walking With Our Sisters, honoring the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada, demonstrates how Indigenous artists bridge the walking and traveling experience to enact a counter-mapping practice for resurgence and healing of the community. Finally, Frost Exploding Trees Moon, a solo performance choreographed by Michelle Olson and Floyd Favel, presents how Indigenous performers draw from travel stories and nomadic experiences of their ancestors to establish contemporary artistic expressions of embodied mapping as forms of resistance to colonial narratives. Drawing from decolonial cartographic approaches and Indigenous perspectives on land and mapmaking, these Indigenous activist and artistic performances of journeying are theorized as counter-mapping practices offering decolonial mapping of Turtle Island and embodied healing.

Since the mid-16th century, cartographic representations of the New World included a large river that crossed the southern continent from east to west. Despite names such as Santa María de la Mar Dulce or Río de Orellana, in reference to the Spanish captain who led the expedition that made its hazardous discovery in 1542, a mythical European reference ended up prevailing: the Amazons River. This hydronym also became the toponym that since then refers to the extensive basin defined by the wide main channel with its innumerable tributaries. Nevertheless, during the colonial domination period, none of the European empires used the term “Amazon” to officially name any of their jurisdictions in America. Then the aim is to demonstrate how French cartography produced during the 18th century constantly presented and reproduced an imagined territorial delimitation marked as “the Country of the Amazons”, probably in accordance with the French colonial interest in establishing a presence in the region disputed mainly by the Spanish and Portuguese. Although, in the end, such delimitation was just another product of the colonial geographic imagination and, specially, of the mythical imaginaries associated with the region since its discovery.

The article concerns travel narratives of Polish video bloggers (or vloggers) who treat a journey through the Americas as a contemporary Grand Tour. Video blogs and their visual storytelling are becoming tools for describing the world in the digital era. In this context, the Americas take on the meaning of a world that is simultaneously close and distant. Traveling on both continents of the other hemisphere is characterized by a double clash of civilizations and a confrontation with one’s imagination created on the basis of encounters with the media and culture of the Americas. It is also a clash with the myth of America and, at the same time, a story about the role of a vlogger as a narrator consolidating their audience and the network community in the act of looking beyond the horizon and behind the scenes of “real America.” The research will use the analysis of the content of audiovisual material from selected YouTube travel channels and elements of netnographic analysis of virtual communities gathered around the best Polish travel vlogs.

The gender discourse had an important role in the ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union and proved to be an effective weapon of the Cold War. In American imagination, the image of a Soviet woman became an epitome of ‘the other’ which both personified the threat of communism and eased domestic anxieties about rigid gender roles in the post-war US. However, the Cold War was not a homogeneous process. The period from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s referred to as the Khrushchev Thaw, was characterized by attempts of peaceful coexistence between the two superpowers culminating in Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in September 1959. Nina P. Khrushcheva, the wife of the first secretary of the Communist Party, became the first high-rank communist woman to tour the United States with an official visit. The American press took this opportunity to humanize the image of a woman from the other side of the iron curtain and, consequently, defuse tensions on the international stage. Khrushcheva’s visit became a turning point in constructing the image of Soviet femininity, introducing a stereotype of different but not intimidating womanhood. Despite the fact that the fragile hopes for peace between the Western and Eastern Blocs were shattered soon after Khrushchev’s visit, the popular rhetoric of the Soviet femininity was transformed. The present article analyzes the shift in the Soviet gender codes presented in the American newspapers, and puts them into historical context to show how international policies can gain human face in the press.

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) traveled to Bucharest in December, 1978, to assist his Romanian-born wife who wished to attend to her dying mother. He experienced Bucharest for the first time and realistically conveyed his wife’s humiliating experience with the Securitate of Ceauşescu’s regime in the novel The Dean’s December (1982). This contribution will underscore the anxiety which Bellow experienced writing the novel, leading him to pre-emptive self-censorship, undermining to some extent his brief look inside communist Romania and its people during its repressive years. Bellow followed up that novel 18 years later with a pronounced anti-Romanian take in Ravelstein (2000) in which, among other themes, the youthful fascist past his former university colleague and friend Mircea Eliade is exploited to implicate Eliade in Profesor Ioan Culianu’s murder on campus in 1991. Ravelstein is revealed as a cruel novel impugning a few stand-in Romanian characters, as Bellow exposes his thoroughly modified perspective on Romania.

This paper analyzes some of the recent literature of the War on Terror—such as Elliot Ackerman’s aptly titled memoir Places and Names (2019) and Phil Klay’s ironically named novel Missionaries (2020)—and explores the spatial dynamics, cultural encounters, and dislocations caused by the series of interrelated conflicts that have characterized the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In doing so, I argue that these narratives highlight the spatially and temporally indefinite nature of the so-called Global War on Terror by portraying displaced civilians and by negating the traditional journey of the soldier, who is instead depicted as incessantly searching for a home in the next war. Using Achille Mbembe’s characterization of contemporary warfare as characterized by war machines (theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus) I highlight the way in which war zones are portrayed as the economically significant and self-replicating engines of the global network of power and violence that underlies modern warfare. In this context, the characters of these stories are then depicted as nomadic individuals doomed to perpetually look for their metaphorical home, war itself, across the globe, travelling from one warzone to the next and constituting the threads of a web of smaller conflicts that take place simultaneously, in a seemingly never-ending cycle, around the world.

This article offers an analysis of the 2018 play Sovereignty by Cherokee playwright, lawyer, and activist Mary Kathryn Nagle. First performed at the Arena Stage Theatre in Washington DC, Sovereignty unfolds over two parallel timelines: present-day Oklahoma and the early 1800s in the southern Appalachians. In the present day, young Cherokee lawyer Sarah Ridge Polson and Cherokee Attorney General Jim Ross defend the inherent jurisdiction of the Cherokee Nation under the Violence Against Women Act in a pivotal case before the US Supreme Court. This modern struggle is juxtaposed with scenes from the 1800s, where their ancestors grapple with a proposed treaty with Andrew Jackson’s administration, leading to the signing of the Treaty of New Echota and the Trail of Tears. By juxtaposing historical and contemporary events, Nagle illuminates the enduring effects of government policies and laws that continue to render Indigenous people, particularly Indigenous women, vulnerable. This article explores how Sovereignty exemplifies Indigenous feminist literary activism through performative counter-storytelling, a method that enacts decolonization and reframes the stage as a critical space for asserting Indigenous performative sovereignty and self-determination. Using an Indigenous feminist literary critical approach, this article shows how Nagle constructs a counter-narrative that advances decolonization by addressing gendered outcomes of colonial law, challenging patriarchal cultural practices of misrepresentation, and embodying “radical relationality”—a concept of collective political organization based on principles of interdependency and responsibility. Through the character of Sarah Ridge Polson and her activism to restore sovereignty over her body and her nation, Sovereignty exemplifies Indigenous feminist activism through theater, reasserting Indigenous women as agents of cultural transmission and tribal values, illustrating that tribal sovereignty and gender empowerment are inherently interconnected and mutually reinforcing.

The article focuses on the problem of Indigenous theatrical sovereignty which is examined on the basis of theater/performance theories and practices by such Aboriginal artists/theorists/performers from Canada as Floyd Favel, Monique Mojica and Kim Senklip Harvey. The theoretical framework of this study focuses on the decolonization and indigenization of theatrical practices, and specifically on theater as artistic ceremony and theater as a research methodology. The selected artists vehemently oppose colonial violence, exploitation and marginalization of Indigenous populations, their lands and cultures. They are interested in the reclamation and revitalization of Indigenous philosophies and traditions via theater/performance. They explore the development of dramatic techniques informed by Indigenous philosophies rooted in the Indigenous holistic concept of the land as sacred, as a living entity, and an archive of stories. They believe in the plural nature of reality, and they honor non-anthropocentric perspectives and relational worldviews. Each of the artists is discussed with reference to theories and methods informed by research into their specific cultures and knowledges, which they reclaim and transform into performance. Favel is discussed as a pioneer of Indigenous dramaturgies whose principles were abstracted from selected elements of his Plains Cree cultural traditions. His “Native Performance Culture” is the first documented theory and method consciously created from Aboriginal heritage. Mojica’s methods are shown as developed from her research into structures and principles abstracted from mola, the textile art of her ancestors, Kuna people, as well as from her embodied research into pre-contact earthworks and mounds. Harvey’s innovative theater methodologies, “Salish Earthing” and “Fire Creation Methodology,” are reflected upon as grounded in her strong relation to the Salish land. The artists challenge the Western theatre conventions, and replace them with sovereign land-based Indigenous theater/performance processes and methodologies, aiming to create the acts of healing, community making, resurgence, survivance, as well as the respect and care for the land and all creation. They offer hope at the time of diverse global environmental, social and cultural crises.

The present review looks at the recent contribution to the Routledge Research in Travel Writing series—Traveling Bodies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Traveling as an Embodied Practice, edited by Nicole Maruo-Schröder, Sarah Schäfer-Althaus, and Uta Schaffers. The review discusses the contents of the volume, the concept and methodology employed in the work, as well as the major aspects pertaining to its position within the broad field of travel writing. It offers an evaluation of the originality of the collection and assesses the quality of the contributions included in the volume, highlighting how the gathered articles enrich the ongoing academic debate on travel, travel writing and the embodied experience of mobility and movement. The present review looks at the recent contribution to the Routledge Research in Travel Writing series—Traveling Bodies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Traveling as an Embodied Practice, edited by Nicole Maruo-Schröder, Sarah Schäfer-Althaus, and Uta Schaffers. The review discusses the contents of the volume, the concept and methodology employed in the work, as well as the major aspects pertaining to its position within the broad field of travel writing. It offers an evaluation of the originality of the collection and assesses the quality of the contributions included in the volume, highlighting how the gathered articles enrich the ongoing academic debate on travel, travel writing and the embodied experience of mobility and movement.