Geomodernism insists that we cannot theorize modernist art within a national frame, emphasizing embeddedness and interconnection over isolation. Doing so requires reckoning with how questions of race and citizenship, migration and war, empire and revolution change our assessment of the aesthetics and politics of modernism. I begin with a call for a clearer sense of the relations among geomodernisms, global modernisms, and postcoloniality to suggest that US modernist studies could subtend geomodernist emphasis on place further by harnessing the insights of ethnic and postcolonial studies more fully. The global can neither be assumed as inert fact or impossible aspiration. Drawing on Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death (1926), I argue for a more robust focus on decolonial practice, on border as method, and on the ongoing racial violence of a settler state to highlight the unresolved presence of US empire and extraction in the hemisphere alongside submerged histories of labor migration.