Joshua H Roth

Joshua H. Roth is Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies at Mount Holyoke College. His is the author of Brokered Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Migrants in Japan (Cornell University Press, 2002), which won the Social Science Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2004. He has published numerous articles including “Heartfelt Driving: Discourses on Manners, Safety, and Emotion in Japan’s Era of Mass Motorization” (The Journal of Asian Studies, 2012), “Hoko onchi: Way-finding and the Emergence of Directional Tone-Deafness in Japan” (Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, 2015), and “Kamikaze Truckers in Postwar Japan” (Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, 2019). A long list of works available here.

Get in touch

jroth@mtholyoke.edu

Richard L. Roth

Artist

I have developed an inventory of idiosyncratic shapes, each a small choreography of the eye and the hand. These shapes are arbitrary and willful assertions of myself, diagrammatic tracings of my nature. By so indulging my individuality, I coax energies from myself that might transcend myself.

From the beginning, these shapes and their arrangements suggested an exotic form of writing. I realized this possibility by giving phonetic values to many of the shapes so that they could “spell” out words and sentences. This phonetic system is so ambiguous and cumbersome that I often have difficulty “reading” earlier work. My concern with visual effects rather than verbal statements has produced this awkwardness, which I enjoy.

Assigning phonetic values to my shapes has allowed me to compose sentences, which generate unforeseen combinations of shapes, problems and possibilities in connecting the shapes with each other, shapes that drifted and evolved over time. While the verbal content is largely incidental to the visual composition, perhaps feelings that I attach to certain words and expressions affect, in a subtle way, the visual character of the work. If I cultivate this tendency, intellectual, literary and poetic energies of my mind can augment my visual energies and help keep my work developing.