EDITORIAL PROJECT

pOST:mETRO:pOLIS

(What remains) afterwards

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POSTMETROPOLIS is an editorial project that publishes electronic texts (with DOI) as well as printed, paper-based books (with ISBN).

Our editorial is non-profit and makes up a part of the ongoing activities of the cultural association Culturas Radicales [Radical Cultures]. For the most part, the papers are published in Castilian Spanish but some are selected and translated into English. All of the information on our website is available in Castilian, Gallego (Galicia), Euskera (Basque Country), Catalan (Catalonia), French and English.

Its name, POSTMETROPOLIS, is meant to highlight, on a global scale, the declining centrality of Western culture in general, and of European culture in particular. Processes of economic and financial globalisation have had a profound effect on the geopolitics of western culture, on its civilizing identity and its underlying epistemological foundations. As the West loses its prominence and its weight in the global order, the dominant knowledge forms that accompanied its economic, political and military hegemony have been subjected, in unprecedented fashion, to important criticisms that shed light on the ideological assumptions on which the West secured its modern foothold as civilization. Much of this criticism comes from postcolonial perspectives, but it needs be complemented by a critical distancing borne out of the declining metropolitan itself.

For the history of the West, a postmetropolitan scenario is on the making –the cultural and intellectual effects of which this editorial seeks to trace, analyse and reflect on. It involves a shift that merits and demands historical study in its own right. But a postmetropolitan context also carries the added virtue of radically redirecting our historical gaze towards a more holistic understanding of Western reality in its entirety, thus situating quite decisively in the past those representations and traditions that have until very recently been treated as natural, permanent and universal, or universalisable –confused with all which is considered “human”.

Once resituated in the past, historicised, that which remains is essentially an “afterwards” –the predominant cultural reality in which we find ourselves living today in the twenty-first century, and whose most thoughtful reflections give rise and purpose to this editorial endeavour.

The term postmetropolis has been used before and is most often associated with the work of the radical, North American expert in urbanism Ed Soja, who put forth the term as a way of characterising the changes that were taking shape in big cities in an era of accelerated globalization. The significance of the term as it is used in this editorial is different and much more encompassing and ambitious: With it we seek to synthesize a whole set of phenomena that have accompanied the Old Continent’s loss of status in the geopolitical world, and that have had an especially pronounced effect on the dominant, authoritative knowledge forms that accompanied the consolidation of Western hegemony, and that, consequently, underpin the modern social sciences. We believe that an adequate understanding of these processes requires rigorous intellectual work aimed at “thinking historically” about the present, and the future.

POSTMETROPOLIS is located on the web and as such it relies on a system of telematic payments that can be made either in the form of donations or economic collaborations. These payments allow us to maintain and expand our editorial work, including the production of new editions of texts –some of which are published as paper-based books (with an ISBN) and sold at retail price (RSP) and delivered via standard post with the usual shipping costs attached.

The editorial starts off with 13 texts that have been reformatted from previous Contratiempo Editions, along with 2 others that have been published to coincide with the launch of this new journal collection.

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POSTMETROPOLIS is organised into several collections:

The POST Collection

The METRO Collection

The POLIS Collection

The ANCESTORS Collection

The TRACES Collection, that includes selected English translations of articles from any of the other four sections.

SELECTION of Books in paperback.

The collections are updated by our journal editors who select papers that have been submitted electronically to the editorial. For the moment, we do not provide feedback on the selected publications, which are decided upon by our editorial team according to the coherency and aims of the arguments presented, as well as to the timeliness of the submissions.

The texts are edited by members of the editing team whose work is paid for through the sales of our printed books and by the donations the editorial receives. As well, the editorial organises online publicity campaigns that are held on a monthly basis, coinciding with the publications of new texts.

The editorial offers a royalty of 20 per cent, which is obtained once the editorial costs have been met.