UC San Diego

This dissertation reimagines Black girlhood in the English-speaking Caribbean through Tallawah—a framework that expands beyond resilience to center joy, play, love, defiance, and community. Through ethnography, oral history, cultural analysis, and personal narrative, it examines how force-ripe ideology, state violence, and religious conservatism shape Black girlhood while foregrounding acts of defiance and world-making by Black girls and queer communities. Drawing on cultural practices such as ring games, stilt-walking, and community spaces like Kindred on the Rock, it highlights how Black girls reclaim autonomy and craft spaces of care. Using storytelling and performance as counter-narratives, it offers Tallawah as a radical intervention into Black girlhood studies, Caribbean Studies, and transnational feminist thought—shifting the discourse from survival to the fullness of Black girlhood in all its audacity, imagination, and possibility.