"Drunk with the fiery rhythms of jazz:" Anzia Yezierska, Hybridity, and the Harlem Renaissance

This essay analyzes images of blackness in Anzia Yezierska's novels and short stories. Instead of viewing Yezierska within the confines of immigrant writing, it situates her within the context of concurrent movements in black American literature. By placing Yezierska within the historical milieu of the Jazz Age and Harlem Renaissance, it argues that these images of blackness, including references to jazz, mark her protagonists' ambivalence about assimilation. It thus explores how Yezierska's writing expresses a model of cultural hybridity by symbolically addressing the dialectic of black and white—a strategy reflected in her protagonists' attempts to model hybrid selves.