Book review: Romano Renee Christine, Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Post War America

Romano Renee Christine, Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Post War America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, xiii + 368 pp., US$65. ISBN-0-674-01033-7.

INFLUENCE OF WORT FERMENTATION CONDITIONS ON THE CONTENT OF BIOGENIC AMINES IN WHITE TABLE WINE MATERIALS

Изучено влияние условий и способа брожения виноградного сусла на концентрацию биогенных аминов в белых столовых виноматериалах. Виноматериалы приготовлены путем сбраживания сусла винограда сорта Шардоне расой дрожжей Pro Elif, обладающей наибольшей декарбоксилирующей способностью, и расой Судак VI-5 (контроль), обеспечившей наименьшее накопление биогенных аминов. Брожение сусла проводили в лабораторных условиях стационарным, непрерывным и дробно-доливным способами. Концентрации биогенных аминов в виноматериалах определены методом высокоэффективной жидкостной хроматографии. Представлены экспериментальные данные о содержании биогенных аминов – гистамина, метиламина, кадаверина, путресцина и фенилэтиламина в белых столовых виноматериалах, произведенных с применением различных способов брожения с перемешиванием бродящей среды и без него. Установлено, что существенное влияние на концентрацию биогенных аминов оказывает раса дрожжей. Применение расы Pro Elif привело к большему образованию биогенных аминов в сравнении с расой Судак VI-5. Перемешивание не оказало существенного влияния на количество биогенных аминов. Показано, что при дображивании увеличилась концентрация гистамина, метиламина и фенилэтиламина. Установлено, что наибольшее увеличение концентрации суммы биогенных аминов отмечается при выдержке виноматериала на дрожжевом осадке, особенно при отсутствии перемешивания. The influence of the conditions and method of fermentation of grape must on the concentration of biogenic amines in white table wine materials was studied. Wine materials prepared by fermenting the wort of the Chardonnay grape variety by the Pro Elif yeast race, which has the greatest decarboxylating ability, and the Sudak VI-5 race (control), which provided the least accumulation of biogenic amines. Fermentation of the wort was carried out under laboratory conditions in a stationary, continuous and fractional-topping way. The concentrations of biogenic amines in wine materials were determined by high-performance liquid chromatography. Experimental data on the content of biogenic amines – histamine, methylamine, cadaverine, putrescine and phenylethylamine in white table wine materials produced using various fermentation methods with and without stirring of the fermenting medium are presented. It was found that the yeast race has a significant effect on the concentration of biogenic amines. The use of the Pro Elif race led to a greater formation of biogenic amines in comparison with the Sudak VI-5 race. Mixing did not significantly affect the amount of biogenic amines. It was shown that the concentration of histamine, methylamine and phenylethylamine increased during fermentation. It was found that the greatest increase in the concentration of the sum of biogenic amines is observed when the wine material is aged on a yeast lees, especially in the absence of mixing.

The Fluidity of Racial Classifications

In this article, I review the social science literature on racial fluidity, the idea that race is flexible and impermanent. I trace the ongoing evolution of racial classifications and boundaries in the United States and Latin America, two regions that share a history of European colonization, slavery, and high levels of race mixing but that have espoused very different racial ideologies. Traditionally, for many groups in the United States, race was seen as unchangeable and determined by ancestry; in contrast, parts of Latin America have lacked strict classification rules and embraced race mixing. However, recent research has shown that race in the United States can change across time and context, particularly for populations socially defined as more ambiguous, while some Latin American racial boundaries are becoming more stringent. I argue that the fluidity of race has redefined our understanding of racial identities, and propose several directions for future political science scholarship that bridges disciplines and methodological approaches.

The Mestizos of Kisar: An insular racial laboratory in the Malay Archipelago

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mestizos of Kisar, a dry, almost barren island in the Dutch East Indies off the coast of East Timor, were a model for the study of race mixing or human hybridity. Discovered in the late nineteenth century, these ‘anomalous blondes’ of Dutch and Kisarese ancestry became subjects of intense scrutiny by physical anthropologists. As a German specialist in tropical medicine in search of a convenient empire after 1918, Ernst Rodenwaldt favourably evaluated the physique and mentality of the isolated, fair Mestizos in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Back in Germany in the 1930s, as professor of hygiene at Heidelberg, his views on race hardened to accord with Nazi doctrine. Yet after the war, Rodenwaldt successfully cited his earlier appreciation of mixed-race peoples in the eastern Malay Archipelago as grounds for rehabilitation. Once a celebrated case study in human hybridity, the Mestizos of Kisar were erased from anthropological discussion in the 1950s, when race mixing ceased to be a biological issue and became instead a sociological interest. Still, Rodenwaldt's work continues to exert some limited influence in the eastern parts of the archipelago and among the Kisarese diaspora, indicating the penetrance and resilience of colonial racialisation projects.

Chaste Impossibilities: Adultery and Individuation in Othello

This chapter advances the polemical argument that Desdemona is guilty of adultery insofar as she is a creature of the flesh. Chronicling the recent turn away from the “saint or strumpet” debate about Othello’s wife that runs through the first few centuries of the play’s criticism, this chapter maintain that the current critical construction of Desdemona as a chaste but sexual subject often amounts to an essentialist guardianship of her Christian virtue. This construction protects Desdemona from the self-adulterating consequences of her marriage – her race-mixing union in the flesh with a black man and arguably a Muslim. Just as often, this construction takes Desdemona’s chastity as an object of critical certainty, ironically reinforcing the claim of so many Renaissance marriage moralizers that chaste wives must be transparent subjects – their thoughts and actions completely legible to their husbands who head the marital body. This chapter treats adultery as an inevitable effect of a wife being both too much one with and too separate from her husband.