A well-conceived and coherently structured anthology, Jesook Song and Laam Hae's edited volume On the Margins of Urban South Korea will be a welcome addition to Korean studies. Taking two critical concepts, “Asia as method” and “core location” by Chen Kuan-Hsing and Baik Young-seo, respectively, as principal guiding epistemes, the book provides a new account of marginalized subjects in contemporary South Korea. While most of the contributors maintain empirical, ethnographic methodology, they also reassess the two aforementioned critical concepts, endeavoring to actualize these rather abstract concepts in the context of “praxis.”
As the introduction eloquently illustrates, with Chen's “Asia as method,” authors attempt to decolonize and de-imperialize knowledge production on Asia and to inter-reference locally and transnationally intertwined relations, problems, and marginality, while also practicing caution about the “spatial fetishism” of Asia (p. 9). At the same time, in an effort to critique postcolonial urban paradigms focusing on “discursive challenges to academic Eurocentrism” (p. 11), as well as to overcome the reification of Asia, they turn to Baik's concept of “core location,” a doubly marginalized location where “the potential to generate new politics and regional and global solidarity lies” (p. 4). Richly informed by these two concepts, all contributors endeavor to facilitate a “common ground among people and intellectuals across different places” (p. 11). While they insightfully examine different core locations of South Korea, they also interweave each other's research to practice Baik's other critical ideas, including “critical self-reflection,” “praxis,” and “communicative connection.” Indeed, at the core of the book lie this critical self-reflection in research and the solidarity between scholars, activists, and people living at the margin.
In the first chapter, Sujin Eom traces how the ethnic Chinese population and their neighborhood in Incheon have been doubly marginalized by the Cold War legacy and the structural alienation of the recent government-led reorganization of the district. Eom underlines the facile commodification of the neighborhood along the nationwide “Chinatown fever” (p. 37), as well as the ethnic Chinese populations’ inconvenience of having to cope with the imagined Chinatown.
In chapter 2, Youjeong Oh highlights a contested development project in Jeju. Oh meticulously analyzes how the English language became an “oppressive power” (p. 50) as a by-product of both the neoliberal restructuring of South Korean economy and the government initiative of globalization. Oh also demonstrates that the short-sighted project of the Jeju Global Education City engendered harmful consequences, including environmental destruction, low economic effect, and the protection of established social order.
Chapter 3 underscores the pro-greenbelt activism in South Korea as a core location. Laam Hae historicizes the formation and neoliberal persistence of the South Korean construction state and rigorously assesses the politically arranged and speculatively executed greenbelt deregulation in South Korea. Hae also recounts a coalition of grassroots activists in the 1990s that resisted capitalist political modernity in solidarity.
In chapter 4, Hyeseon Jeong uses David Harvey's concept of “spatio-temporal fix” to provide a new perspective on the intra-Asian marriage migration in Pohang city. Jeong reasonably argues that the Pohang Global Saemaul program's housing project in Vietnam for the natal families of marriage migrant women is in essence to promote “social stability and reproduction” (p. 93), while it steers away from these women's subjection to the patriarchal system and paternalistic aid from South Korea.
Chapter 5 makes a compelling case for intra-Asian solidarity in activism and amplifies the idea of “critical self-reflection” and “praxis” by examining the ways in which community activists for the urban poor have nurtured “reflexivity as an ethics of solidarity” (p. 134). In this chapter, Mun Young Cho furthers Chen's idea of “inter-referencing” to comprehend community activists’ self-reflection through international solidarity, while both critiquing and appreciating the “affective turn in activism” (p. 118).
In chapter 6, Jesook Song effectively presents a case study of a metropolitan poor neighborhood where residents and community activists practiced an alternative concept of welfare in times when welfare has become panacea for neoliberal capitalism. Based on a decade of fieldwork, Song offers a genuine account of the community's efforts to mobilize themselves against the government-led welfare initiative that overlooks the structural and systematic problems.
Finally, chapter 7 focuses on Changsin-dong neighborhood in Seoul, where former garment factory workers run small-scale “home-factories” (p. 168). Reflecting the temporal significance of the “field,” Seo Young Park notes that the presence of these workers, community activists, scholars, and the still effective memory of activism renders the neighborhood a “pioneering front line for the new paradigm of urban renewal” (p. 179) despite some side effects of urban regeneration.
For all these critical interventions, the book is a relatively short anthology and does not encompass more diverse “core locations.” The margin is a relative concept. Some marginal lives and relations, including gender minorities, sex workers, former Hansen's disease patients, and undocumented immigrants, are so systematically ghosted that one often overlooks the urgency of taking account of their existence. Readers may wish the book had included more chapters that grapple with locations inhabited by these discursively foreclosed populations.
This minor concern, however, does not detract from the book's main strength that illustrates the ways in which locations of different marginal subjects emerge in solidarity with scholars, activists, and other disenfranchised people. In addition, readers may particularly appreciate the humble and sincere afterword, in which the editors recount their four years of collaboration with the contributors. As this self-reflexive afterword evinces, the book will resonate with academics who hope to see more pluralized and diverse scholarship on South Korea.
