On Blackness and Being: Cameron Awkward-Rich’s Sympathetic Little Monster(s)

This thesis project examines the intertextuality between Cameron Awkward-Rich’s poetry collection Sympathetic Little Monster (2016) and earlier African American texts: Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents of a Slave Girl (1860) and Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973). Focusing on intertextuality and the trope of the train, this project analyzes Awkward-Rich’s collection which details how black bodies are still subjected to oppression and anti-black/anti-trans violence. His poems explore how black trans subjects are inhibited from reaching “arrival,” wholeness, and freedom in one’s representation and expression of their identity. White supremacy and constructs of race and gender attempt to dictate the speakers’ movements, possibilities, and mobility. Paying close attention to references to the past and the trope of the train, I examine how Awkward-Rich’s poetry interrogates black trans legibility, subjectivity, and subjugation.