This article considers whether the novel Banjo's sailors and vagabonds, described by James Smethurst as proponents of “a transnational proletarian blackness,” provide a Harlem Renaissance-era alternative to Monica L. Miller's Harlem-centred notion of “subversive dandyism.” Indeed, author Claude McKay – a Jamaican who spent much of the 1920s and 1930s abroad before taking American citizenship in 1940 – has come increasingly to be regarded, as by the novelist Caryl Phillips, as one among numerous twentieth-century “writers for whom the national label is unhelpful if we wish to see the full nature of their achievement.” McKay declared that “a patriot loves not his nation, but the spiritual meannesses of his life of which he has created a frontier wall to hide the beauty of other horizons.” This article addresses Banjo's representation of sartorial self-fashioning as part of this critique of narrowly national identities.