For many scholars of the African diaspora, the genre of travel writing represents a worldview largely informed by Western conquest and colonization. American writer James Baldwin’s encounters with West Africans and North Africans – described in essays he wrote between 1950 and 1972 – questions a longstanding presumption: that African American expatriate writers transcended the limits of travel-writing in order to stand in opposition to colonialist concepts of modernity. This chapter argues that Baldwin’s travel essays implicate dislocated subjects in complex networks of power, at times reasserting Europe’s colonial and racial logics and at times challenging them.