Stitching the 24-Hour City: Life, Labor, and the Problem of Speed in Seoul

Stitching the 24-Hour City would be an excellent text for courses that offer subjects of contemporary Korea as much as the book is pertinent to be read in the classes of urban studies, anthropology of temporality, and feminist labor studies. It presents ethnographic material, treated with utmost sensitivity and conceptual sophistication. The book's prose endeavors to embody the principle of “a stitch at a time” (han ttam han ttam), an expression of “the great deal of care, time, and high-quality skill that handmade artisan clothes requires” (12), which the author claims is still carried on by seasoned seamstresses in their machine-stitching for fast-fashion manufacturing. The rich contents of the book deal with garment workers' tempo of production and circulation in Dongdaemun Market, the largest retail area in South Korea, where those veteran seamstresses-cum-designers work and live for the supply of on-demand, just-in-time, short-cycled clothing items.Rather than focusing on the hardship or even victimhood of women workers in the garment industry who are the majority of her interlocutors, the author carves out the tacit and multiple meanings of speed, flow, pace, and rhythm in those women workers' lives and affects. Indeed, it provides a fine-tuned ethnography through perspicacious analysis of temporality that is unpacked with “experienced speed”—which is the temporality actually lived, felt, and narrated by seasoned seamstresses—differently from approaches that tend to focus on “abstract speed”—the kind of universalizing temporality as condition and motor of the capitalist accumulation machine that merely imposes, constrains, and exploits workers.Further, in the Korean historical and social context, the book does not treat the issue of speed as one that has simply arisen from the results of “compressed” South Korean capitalist development, as the author provides a review of predominant usage of the notion (22). Instead, it critically examines trajectories of discourses on the “problem of speed” deployed by seemingly opposite sides in the discussion of social dynamics. In the second part of the book, the author illuminates the parallel trajectories through MANI, a social enterprise in Dongdaemun Market in the spirit of long-term labor activism in the district (e.g., commemoration of Chun Tae-il's death) and recent successive mayors of the Seoul municipality that were invested in changing landscapes of the Dongdaemun area. Both MANI and municipality problematized “speed” in the past as culprit of Dongdaemun development in respective contexts. MANI problematized the speed for undervaluing and exploiting workers in that it proposed a motto of slow production speed as a premise for retraining garment workers as artisans. Whereas recent regimes of the Seoul municipality distanced itself from the previous decades' regimes with criticism of their urban planning as a development project for the sake of growth, it instead proposed urban regeneration with an environmental focus as post-development programs, such as in the project of Cheongyecheon stream restoration.However, the author points out that MANI and municipality governments engendered their own conundrums without overcoming the problem of speed that they criticized. By unraveling these complex trajectories of both cases, the book poignantly argues that speed is neither simply reflective of capitalist interests, nor is economic growth a bygone development when ecological urban planning is framed as post-development. Most of all, the book refutes a linear understanding of temporality that renders invisible the presence of garment workers in the present day.The author stiches, with a “great deal of care, time,” and fine ethnographic skills, indeed han ttam han ttam, the layers of under-conceptualized temporalities through workers' personal attachments to their labor that do not correspond to a structural understanding of their labor being alienated from the means of production within the capitalist accumulation process. For example, the book introduced Oksun's narrative of her intimate attachment to her work (see prologue and conclusion); Hyeyoung's description of family and work rhythms as overlapped rather than as clashed (chapter 2); and Sang-Ah and her husband's excitement at witnessing the full process of garment production (chapter 3).One thing I wish, though, is that the book could have “stitched” further terrains of “abstract speed” and “experienced speed” more consistently. While it is not that the author fails to demonstrate understanding of structural violence entirely, in the context of highlighting the potential of theorizing multiple temporalities, the book tends to simplify Marxist theory as only tending to lineal temporality or inattentive to material power of feeling and experience. As the author succinctly defined “stitching” as “the basic and fine act of connecting two separate edges to fabricate a bigger piece, literally and metaphorically addresses an ethnographic lens through which we can see the contradictions of these relations” (11), I wonder if abstract speed and experienced speed could have been stitched rather than left as a lopsided juxtaposition, if not irreconciled.Regardless, the book's contribution and accomplishment cannot be appreciated enough in the fields of contemporary Korean studies, especially enriching nuanced approaches to “compressed” modernity, as well as urban studies and economic anthropology for the direction of understanding temporality more tuned with affective, experienced, and plural.

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