Transnational black studies are having a moment, particularly in the literary realm. Whilst the moment may or may not be connected to Barack Obama's eight years in the White House, the specifics of his diasporic upbringing and mixed-race parentage mean that he helps to make intelligible for the wider public in America and across the world the idea that blackness – asserted as an identity – is complex and contradictory. This idea has been communicated by black diasporan writers down the ages: specifically that black identities are complex, not singular, and mobile, not static, and are located everywhere, from Hawaii to Nairobi. In their books Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature and “Shuttles in the Rocking Loom”: Mapping the Black Diaspora in African American and Caribbean Fiction, Jason Frydman and Jennifer Terry read black diasporan literary production as unbound and unrestricted, multidirectional, transnational and transhistorical. They argue that the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism and plantation cultures are just one set of origins for this literature. Frydman is emphatic in his assertion of African American and Caribbean literature as world literature and analyses his chosen six authors across four languages with a decisively comparative-literature approach. Terry, whose study includes African American, francophone and anglophone Caribbean, as well as black British, texts, uses the concept of mapping and “countergeographies” to weave a complex conversation of theme and character with form and poetics. The unceasing tension between movement and rootedness that she examines gives shape to this ambitious work that covers novels by twenty-five writers.

Both Terry and Frydman use The Black Atlantic (1993) by Paul Gilroy and Poetics of Relation (1997) by Edouard Glissant as points of departure for new engagements with their influential theories of literary production. Meticulously researched, Frydman and Terry's texts are part of a broader scholarly conversation that rejects both linguistic and national boundaries in their engagement of black diasporan cultures and creative outputs. As such Sounding the Break and “Shuttles in the Rocking Loom” anticipate and are amplified by texts conceived in a similar vein, such as the collection Anywhere but Here: Black Intellectuals in the Atlantic World and Beyond (2015), edited by Kendahl Radcliffe, Jennifer Scott and Anja Werner, and Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction (2015) by Elena Machado Sáez. These texts, like Terry's and Frydman's, eschew the maps put in place to serve European colonial enterprises where they restrict and constrain ways of understanding the politics, economics and cultures in present and past communities of the black Atlantic. They do so in order to bring to light the stories told in multiple languages across centuries and land masses, stories which crisscross oceans, returning and departing somewhat altered but nevertheless recognizable, if one knows what to look for. We are provided with excellent analytical and conceptual tools to do so by Terry and Frydman.

Sounding the Break argues that within African American and Caribbean literature there are traces, echoes, and sediments of a poetics that stretch back to Muslim and Arabic antiquity across the Atlantic and Mediterranean regions. Frydman traces these ancient literary networks as illuminated within the twentieth-century narratives of W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Alejo Carpentier, Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé and Toni Morrison. In his theoretically complex but compact discussion Frydman argues that texts such Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Condé’s Segu (1987), or Walcott's Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1958) evidence a “quest for a world-literary politics of recognition” (141). This politics of recognition is a bringing to the surface of an awareness of the constant exchange, between oral and written, of fables, folktales, and religious texts as they are woven through and transformed by the black diaspora. A politics of recognition is also about identifying and analysing the archive that surrounds the material production of these texts which often deepens the transversal routes/roots of the literature in question. (The ripple effect caused within the US, European and Caribbean black literary communities when René Maran's novel Batouala won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1921 is a good example of the latter.) Finally, a politics of recognition is a politics that Frydman himself practices in his efforts to show the reader different and more complex aspects of an author and/or the contexts of their literary endeavours. Frydman identifies a “historic cosmopolitanism” that originates before Goethe's assertion of “world literature” (Weltliteratur) in 1827 and extends through to the late twentieth century. The historic sweep of Sounding the Break is one of its particular strengths and the resulting juxtapositions push the reader to think differently about texts and authors they might already know well. In a brief but effective reading of Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), for instance, Frydman pinpoints how Hurston “refracts the epic of Exodus through another diasporic rendering, a new iteration of the text's –and the epic genre's – worldliness carried out by means of linguistic and tonal diversity” (60). Readers have most often overlooked Hurston's “discursive diversity,” Frydman argues, because “the overpowering effectiveness of her textualization of the vernacular” (60) becomes what we both expect and desire of Hurston. This, unfortunately, obscures the complexity of her work and of her life.

Terry is equally concerned with giving the reader a legible map of the dense circuits of meaning that animate black diasporan literature. In what she calls “a reading of expressive counter mappings” (3) and by explicitly broadening Gilroy's anglophone vision of the black Atlantic, she makes a significant contribution to both black diaspora and postcolonial studies. Terry's argument rests on a beautifully supple idea: the symbolism and metaphor of geography allow a deeper understanding of the black diasporic imaginary if the reader is not just attuned to symbols of displacement and upheaval but also alert to grounding, community and belonging. This idea precisely structures her four expansive and wide-ranging chapters which address the legacies of slavery in the United States North and South, Caribbean plantation and interior landscapes, middle passages and voyages “home,” and city spaces of dwelling and cosmopolitanism. Terry engages Glissant's theories of convergence and creolization – indeed such ideas enable and encourage such a cross-cultural study of black Atlantic texts – however, Terry insists on attending to the simultaneously divergent histories that formed distinct experiences within the diaspora, such as plantation slavery in the anglophone Caribbean versus that of the US South. Terry's explorations of blackness, space and temporality are accomplished and compelling in part because of her ease marshalling African American, Caribbean and comparative scholarship to her purposes.

The organization of “Shuttles in the Rocking Loom” is dexterous as it gives Terry the breadth to attend to a range of twentieth-century African American novels diverse in genre, publication date and standpoint in her first chapter and, similarly, allows in her second chapter for a range of anglophone and francophone Caribbean novels that feature diverse representations of plantations and interior landscapes. She then brings these already varied geographical groupings into comparative focus in chapters 3 and 4. The magnificent scope of each chapter offers readers detailed readings, contextualization and careful analysis. For example, in chapter 2 Terry interrogates Caribbean theories of landscape and the plantation, making good use of Sylvia Wynter and Kamau Brathwaite alongside Glissant and others, to draw out the structural ambivalence and interrelation of the plantation system and individual “plots” of land. These geographical entities, Terry asserts, are the focal point of political engagement, critique and a mapping or remapping of colonial history and postindependence futures in novels which span from the 1940s to the 1990s. Terry's panoramic view of Caribbean literary production facilitates in one section the inspired juxtaposition of Jamaica Kincaid, Jacques Roumain and Maryse Condé for their counterhegemonic representations of the Caribbean environment, botany and refutations of the idea of the Caribbean as a paradise suspended in time and space.

It was useful to read Terry and Frydman's books together in part because of a central metaphor they both invoke: the back-and-forth of a shuttle in a loom, a metaphor highlighted in Terry's title and which is a line from Robert Hayden's famous poem “The Middle Passage.” The image is one of movement, but also of coordination, rhythm and complex machinery. As the diverse voices in Hayden's poem attest, the complexity of black diasporic literary production is always already there; it is not just a reaction to the middle passage, to the New World, to slavery, and it is in the exchange and the traces left by the movement and the palimpsests of experience expressed as the written or spoken word that we can begin to grasp and attend to the truly amazing material and metaphorical “circuits of global narrative traffic” (Frydman 16) that reach across centuries and diverse landscapes. Though distinct in tone and approach, “Shuttles in the Rocking Loom” and Sounding the Break are excellent book choices for those wishing either for the next iteration of black Atlantic studies or for fresh, bold readings of classic African American, Caribbean and black British texts from the twentieth century. These two works of careful scholarship will show readers interested in black diaspora literary studies many new points of connection, debate and theorization.