Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, scholars have debated, modified, and supplemented the original thesis and east-west binary found in his work. In particular, “black Orientalism” and “Afro-Orientalism” have been used to describe a set of orientalist discourses by black scholars, academics, and writers. In this paper, I use Claude McKay’s works and personal archives, international films, and colonial maps to investigate the boundaries of “Africa” and the “Orient” in the imperial and sub-imperial imagination during the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, the sexualization and queering of a sheikh as a racialized subject in popular films and literature disrupts and blurs homo-hetero and gender binaries in such a way that comes to define the “logics” of orientalism. Similarly, I turn to the ways “Afro-Orientalist anxieties” are projected upon and worked through Afro-Arab women. I define Afro-orientalist anxieties as the tension, proximity, ambiguities, and boundaries between the East and the West, “Africa” and the “Orient,” black and Arab, in ways that reveal the fictitious nature of the hyphenated boundary between “Afro” and “Oriental,” as well as the categories themselves. I argue that imperial processes of racialization during the interwar period operated at different registers of meaning – emotionally, linguistically, sexually, and sonically–that allowed for a substantial overlap of blackness and Arabness in interwar period Marseille. Working across, English, French, and Arabic sources, I show how writers, intellectuals, and imperial subjects blur the line between black and Arab, African and Oriental, hetero- and homoeroticism in such a manner that allows for what Brent Edwards calls a “disarticulation” of the categories themselves. Through this dis-articulation, I re-articulate Orientalism as a set of discourses that reveal Africanity and queerness as foundational to the imaginary construction of the “Orient.”