METRO Collection

The Metro Collection

(What remains) after the West

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In this collection there is room for almost all kinds of studies about the past (Spanish, European and, thus by extension, Western) that contribute to the historicisation of the double condition of, on the one hand, an imperial metropolis in decline and, on the other hand, the incomplete or blocked development of the nation-state.

Our point of departure is the relative decline of the nation state as a political unit in an era of globalization so as to focus more specifically on Spain as an extreme example of the difficulties faced today by attempts to construct a legitimate national identity on a territorial scale. Apart from this, we are interested in a wide range of historical studies that will contribute to generating a greater comprehension of the Spanish past –as a nation, as a state, and its societies and cultures throughout the course of what we know as modernity– with the aim of challenging and moving beyond certain commonplaces and established truths that, taken together, make up what has come to be treated rather monolithically as the History of Spain.

It is in this way that we speak of an ‘after Spain’ because once we have accepted the growing loss of the West’s centrality, and of the nation state on a global scale, we can begin to approach Spain, first, before all else, as a past reality. From this historicisation we may then be better able to see Spain as a historical product, overcoming the essentialist perspectives on which its national history have been based –including, on some occasions, its alternative territories on a regional scale.

This collection is subtitled ‘after the West’ or ‘after Europe’, and here Spain serves as the epitome of the universalistic and essentialist aspiration to be genuinely Western –an aspiration that now seems ready to be rethought historically.

To give shape to this collection we are looking for all kinds of work that will contribute to a general restructuring of Spanish history throughout modernity and its increasing transnational configurations. In addition, we are interested in records and documents from these historical epochs, and in testimonies that reflect alternatives to the dominant political culture that existed in these different conjunctures.

We welcome studies that explore different aspects of the last three centuries of Spanish history, with a special emphasis on our most recent phase –that which began with the transition leading us to our current post-Francoist democracy. In addition, we include general essays and anthologies that bring us closer to understanding those social and political cultures that challenge and disrupt modernisation –culturally subaltern and politically radical yet marginalised and disregarded by such metanarratives– and which can thus shed a decisive light on dominant historical dynamics and their ‘official’ accounts.

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TITLES

1. Noelia Adánez (ed.), El pueblo invisible. Para una historia de España desde abajo [The Invisible People. For a History of Spain from Below].

2. François Godicheau (ed.), Democracia inocua. Lo que el posfranquismo ha hecho de nosotros [Flat Democracy. What PostFrancoism has Made of Ourselves].

3. Ariel Jerez y Pablo Sánchez León (eds.), Con la memoria de una República por venir. Conversaciones intergeneracionales sobre cultura antifranquista y democracia .  [With the Memory of a Forthcoming Republic. Intergenerational Conversations on Anti-Francoist Culture and Democracy].

4. Equipo CCR (ed.), Memoria de combate. (Auto)biografía oral de Miguel Romero “Moro” [Combat Memory. An Oral (Self)Biography of Miguel Romero, “Moro”].

5. Pablo Sánchez León, Abundancia y frustración. Por una historia conceptual de la economía en la modernidad latinoamericana [Abundance and Frustration. For a Conceptual History of the Economy on Latinamerican Modernity].

6. Federico Ruiz de Lobera, Crónica de un reportero profano. Veintidós reportajes entre el campo y la ciudad [Chronicle of a Profane Journalist. Twenty two Reports between the Country and the City].