Article title: “Our Hidden Revenge”: Anti/Colonial Rhetorics at a Korean Women’s College Graduation, 1918
Authors: Tillman, N.
Journal: Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Bibliometrics: Volume 53, Number 5, pages 763–781
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2023.2233501
The captions for Figures 4, 5, and 6 are incorrect.
The correct captions are listed below:
Figure 4. Ewha graduates in 1917. Ewha Archives, Ewha Womans University. Used with permission.
Figure 5: Ewha University students in 1950. Ewha Archives, Ewha Womans University. Used with permission
Figure 6. Ewha Hakdang, 1915 graduation. Ewha Archives, Ewha Womans University. Used with permission.
Text on pages 764, 767, 768 note 19, 773, 774, and 775 contained errors. The corrected text is listed below. Changes to the text have been bolded:
p. 764: Finally, I examine the spatial rhetorics hinted at in postceremony photograph, arguing that Japanese and US missionaries jostled to present the modern school building as their own civilizing influence, and showing how the picture’s spatial rhetorics mirror the marginalization of the former Korean king and other would-be European colonizers.
p. 767: At some point during the day—possibly before the 10:30 a.m. ceremony in the First Methodist Church—Ewha students lined up on the sloping lawn of the Ewha campus between Main Hall and the new Simpson Memorial building,
p. 768, note 19: In Figure 6, women wearing caps are visible immediately stage left of the open door and through the top and bottom window panes stage right of the door.
p. 773: Figure 6 shows a photograph taken at Ewha’s Simpson Memorial Hall, evidently following the ceremony. The photograph shows a crowd (inside and outside the building) watching a group of figures clustered on the steps as the latter poses, perhaps for a camera off-screen to the right.
p. 774: Harris’s location highest on the steps and in the center of the group being photographed, therefore, constitutes a questionable rhetorical claim:
p. 775: The arrangement of bodies in Figure 6—with Japanese and missionaries preeminent and Koreans subordinated—also constitutes a spatial rhetoric that maps onto Simpson Hall’s construction and Koreans’ physical displacement. Completed in 1915, Simpson Hall was a primary rhetorical effort of missionaries to display their civilizing influence in Korea. Discursively, this effort entailed characterizing Koreans and their cities as squalid; physically, it meant displacing Koreans and leveling entire neighborhoods to make way for their spacious school and church grounds (“I Hoa”; Scranton “A Section”). The Japanese colonial government had been crafting competing spatial rhetorics, portraying Koreans as slovenly and their cities as disease-ridden, and emphasizing government construction projects (Grunow; Henry “Sanitizing”). In Figure 6, the dominant presence of Simpson Hall represents Western sanitizing and modernizing spatial rhetorics. Presiding on the building’s steps, Sekiya, Harris, and Frey demonstrate both cooperation and conflict as they vie to take credit for wiping Korea clean and erecting this kind of imposing, modern structure.
The spatial rhetorics of Figure 6 include three other types of structures. In the upper right is the Russian legation building (it was just 200 meters north of Simpson Hall), with its tower and Western classical architecture.