Modernism is often discussed in terms of movement: the increased speed brought about by new technologies and new modes of transport; the endlessly circulating networks of international capitalism; the global migrations of peoples. Anglo-American literary modernism, in particular, can be understood through transatlantic journeys, and the expatriate artistic communities created by these voyages. Yet despite this, modernist studies has continued to employ a nationally bounded methodology. This chapter’s focus on the 'black Atlantic' - African-American and Afro-Caribbean modernist writers and their literal and metaphorical transatlantic journeys - necessarily complicates the relationship between discrete nations and cultural production. In the epigraph to this chapter, taken from Jamaican Claude McKay’s Banjo (1929), West Indian Ray is working as a nude model in Paris. While the student artists signal their modernity through their knowledge of primitivism, their construction and objectification of the nonmodern, black body here does not allow for Ray’s entry into 'civilized' discourse.