Abstract
This article examines how artistic practices rooted in Carnival traditions reimagine belonging as a fluid, transnational process rather than a fixed geographic or cultural identity. Focusing on the works of Ken Daley and Collette “Miss Coco” Murray within the Black and Free art series, it explores how these artists transform cultural celebrations such as Carnival and Caribana into platforms for resistance, resilience, and the preservation of diasporic memory. Through a qualitative, multiple case study approach, the analysis demonstrates how visual and performative art function as living archives—sites where historical consciousness, ritual practice, and creative innovation converge to contest colonial narratives and assert Black presence. Drawing on Black Studies diaspora studies, transnational theory, and intersectionality, this study argues that belonging in the Black and Caribbean diaspora is continuously negotiated through embodied performance, symbolic imagery, and communal celebration. By bridging artistic practice with critical theory, the article contributes to understanding how cultural expression mediates emancipatory discourses of home, identity, and freedom in contexts shaped by displacement and the afterlives of slavery.
Plain Language Summary
This article explores how Caribbean festivals like Caribana and Carnival help Black artists express identity, history, and community. It looks at how two artists, Ken Daley and Collette “Miss Coco” Murray, use painting, dance, and costume to celebrate culture and challenge unfair stories about the past. Their work shows that belonging isn’t just about where you’re from—it’s about shared experiences and traditions. The study explains how these festivals become powerful ways to remember history, resist injustice, and bring people together. Overall, it shows how art and celebration help people feel connected and proud of who they are.
Introduction
Each summer, Toronto does not simply burst into color; it shimmers, sways, and sings along the lakeshore as Caribana remakes the city’s soundscape and streetscape. Iridescent headpieces crest above the crowd and rhinestones catch the sun, while Moko Jumbies stride on stilts and mas bands chip behind towering trucks. Steelpan lines glint in the air, soca bass thrums through the chest, and whistles, cowbells, and air horns stitch a common beat as bodies wine and wuk up in time. Flags flare from shoulders and wrists, sketching a brief cartography of diaspora. At J’ouvert, paint and powder make moving murals, rendering memory as motion, touch, and sound.
More than a carnival, Caribana operates as a living archive of diasporic memory and a practice of Black public formation. It has staged resistance, remembrance, and the joyful assertion of Caribbean identity. For diasporic communities, the sonic lineages of steelpan, soca, and calypso resound through urban space to reclaim visibility and belonging in the face of cultural erasure. Through music, movement, and masquerade, Caribana sutures ancestral traditions to contemporary expressions, turning the parade route into a site of connection, continuity, and radical imagination.
Artists often depict Caribana as this living archive. Within this cultural landscape, Ken Daley and Collette “Miss Coco” Murray emerge as vital storytellers. Their practices engage Black identity, freedom, and belonging. Daley’s vibrant mixed-media works and Murray’s performances and cultural programming function as acts of preservation and innovation. This article examines how they mobilize visual art and dance to theorize belonging. Focusing on their 2023 contributions to the Black and Free art series alongside their broader bodies of work, I argue that belonging appears not as a fixed identity but as fluid and transnational, rooted in ritual practice, cultural memory, and creative expression. Through Carnival traditions, both artists show how diasporic communities assert presence, reclaim history, and celebrate resilience.
Methodology
This study uses a qualitative case study approach to examine how music, dance, and ritual foster intergenerational connection and cultural continuity within the Caribbean diaspora in Ontario, Canada. It focuses on two commissioned works from the 2023 Black and Free art series: Ken Daley’s Moko Jumbies and Collette “Miss Coco” Murray’s Un ‘loc’ de riddims in meh body.
Central to the methodology is object analysis, involving close readings of the artworks. Daley’s mixed media triptych is analyzed for its Carnival iconography, spatial composition, and diasporic symbolism. Murray’s multimedia installation and live performance are examined for their use of rhythm, oral history, and collective movement.
The study draws on cultural studies frameworks and uses supporting documentation: photographs, video recordings, artist statements, and interviews. Daley and Murray’s broader portfolios are also reviewed to contextualize their engagement with Blackness, freedom, and diasporic identity through visual and performative expression.
By situating these works within broader diasporic narratives, the study highlights how both artists use creative practice to express transnational identities and reclaim cultural memory in response to colonial erasure and systemic marginalization. This approach reveals how art serves as a site of cultural continuity, resistance, and reimagined identity.
Discussion
This section begins by framing belonging within the context of diaspora, emphasizing its complexity, especially for the Black Caribbean diaspora. It then explores how Caribana and Carnival serve as cultural spaces that preserve heritage and foster belonging through music, ritual, and artistic expression. The discussion focuses on Ken Daley and Collette “Miss Coco” Murray, whose contributions to the Black and Free art series engage with cultural memory and embodied creativity to express diasporic identity. Their work reimagines belonging as a fluid, transnational process. Through visual symbolism, performance, and Carnival traditions, their art becomes a medium for reclaiming history, resisting erasure, and building intergenerational connections.
Belonging in Diaspora
Diaspora signifies “the scattering of a people across different lands and countries and languages” (Chude-Sokei, 2021), but it is more than geographic dispersion; it is a lived condition shaped by memory, movement, and identity. Danticat (2011), citing Haitian journalist Jean Dominique, describes diasporic individuals as “people with their feet planted in both worlds” (p. 51), navigating the tension between origin and settlement. Brah (1996) deepens this understanding by framing diasporic space as a site of both “traumas of separation and dislocation” and “hope and new beginnings” (p. 190). Diaspora is thus a contested terrain where histories collide, and where “home” becomes a shifting concept, at once a “mythic place of desire” and “the lived experience of a locality” (Brah, 1996, pp. 188–189). For Brah, home is plural, processual, and political, shaped by ongoing struggles over belonging and exclusion. Crucially, not all diasporas seek return; many instead place “home” and “dispersion” in creative tension, inscribing longing while resisting fixed notions of origin (Brah, 1996, p. 189).
For the Black diaspora, this tension is intensified by the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and racial violence. Brand (2002) invokes “the door of no return” as a symbol of irretrievable loss: “If we return to the door it is to retrieve what was left . . . empty itself of meaning” (p. 94). Hartman (2007) links diasporic estrangement to a fractured relationship with the past: “If the past is another country, then I am its citizen” (pp. 17–18). Sharpe (2016) theorizes Black existence “in the wake,” where the afterlife of slavery persists through systemic precarity and erasure (p. 14). These conditions render home elusive, often imagined, mourned, or reassembled through cultural practice rather than reclaimed in physical form.
Nevertheless, diasporic life is not defined solely by rupture. Joy, resilience, and resistance animate Black cultural practices, sustaining communities through ritual, performance, and creativity. Despite the colonial project’s attempt to erase and contain, the Black diaspora continues to reimagine belonging as a living practice rooted in memory and collective survival. In the Caribbean context, this dynamic of rupture and regeneration is central. The region’s history of forced migration, slavery, indentureship, and cultural mixing has produced identities that are “constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew” (Hall, 2019, p. 236). Caribbean belonging integrates historical discontinuity with cultural innovation, creating a space that is at once fractured and generative.
This evolution is visible in the Caribbean diaspora in Ontario, particularly Toronto, where Afro-Caribbean migrants have long negotiated belonging in a society marked by systemic anti-Blackness. As Toney (2010) documents, early 20th-century Afro-Caribbean settlers built transnational networks and community institutions that affirmed identity and resisted exclusion. Language, food, music, and festivals like Caribana become acts of cultural continuity and reinvention—rituals that transform displacement into connection. Caribana, in particular, functions as a symbolic return to ancestral memory and a forward-looking assertion of belonging—a reimagining of “home” through collective joy, resistance, and diasporic creativity.
My focus is on Afro-Caribbean artists who engage this diasporic tension through creative practice, particularly in the context of Caribana. Diasporic continuity through rupture is powerfully embodied in the works of Ken Daley and Collette “Miss Coco” Murray. Daley’s paintings map the migration of Carnival traditions from the Caribbean to Canada, embedding symbols of diasporic resilience into the urban landscape. Murray’s choreography traces the routes of the Black Atlantic, reclaiming stilt dance and rhythmic practices as living archives of memory and survival. Both artists demonstrate how diasporic identity is enacted through creative expression—transforming displacement into connection, and longing into liberatory practice.
Caribana and Carnival: Belonging as Resistance and Remembrance
Caribana, Toronto’s annual Caribbean carnival, is more than a cultural celebration; it is a vibrant expression of resistance, remembrance, and reimagination. Since its founding in 1967, the festival has grown from a modest 3-day event into a dynamic, 3-week celebration that draws over a million visitors annually. Rooted in Carnival traditions across the Caribbean, Caribana transforms public space into a site where Black identity, cultural memory, and diasporic belonging are actively performed and affirmed.
While the festival emerged in the mid-20th century, its roots trace back to earlier waves of Afro-Caribbean migration, especially between 1914 and 1929, when individuals from Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados settled in Toronto. These migrants faced systemic barriers in employment, housing, and public life, yet they cultivated resilient communities through churches, social organizations, and political activism. Over time, this diaspora developed a rich cultural and political presence that challenged dominant narratives of Canadian identity. As Philip notes, the festival “has always presented a challenge for the city . . . a large number of Black people” (2017, p. 232). Caribana disrupts normative urban order and asserts visibility in a society marked by systemic anti-Blackness. It is not merely a celebration, but a powerful act of belonging and resistance rooted in a long history of diasporic struggle and community-building.
Carnival traditions themselves are rooted in African spiritual and performative practices, reimagined through the lens of emancipation and survival. These traditions migrated to Canada with Caribbean communities, bringing not only music and dance but also frameworks for reclaiming history and asserting presence. As Collette Murray writes, Caribana evokes “symbolic emancipation of our minds . . . activism within our masqueraded bodies . . . and release of waistlines” (CTR, pp. 33–34). Dance, music, and costume become tools of cultural continuity—forms of intangible heritage that transmit memory and identity across generations. Through these embodied practices, Caribana becomes a living archive of diasporic experience, where Afro-Caribbean people in Ontario transform displacement into joy, resistance, and belonging.
This transmission of memory through celebration echoes Toni Morrison’s reflections in The Site of Memory, where she emphasizes the importance of imagining lives beyond the archive. Caribana embodies this principle, transforming historical absence into embodied presence. As Brah (1996) writes, diasporas are “contested cultural and political terrains where individual and collective memories collide, reassemble and reconfigure” (p. 190). Caribana allows diasporic subjects to engage with histories of displacement not only through mourning, but through joy, rhythm, and ritual. Philip affirms this: “Carnival . . . offers another example of how we, African-descended people, occupy the streets, this time in pleasure, joy, and even remembering” (2017, p. 232).
Philip further captures the shift from invisibility to unapologetic festivity in Blank: Essays and Interviews, describing Black and Brown bodies moving freely through Toronto’s streets: “Look we nuh, look how we enjoying we self right here in Canada self and Toronto sweet sweet too bad [. . .] catching the African spirit and dancing and fighting . . .” (Philip, 2017, p. 222; Mohammed, 2022, p. 80). Ricketts (2024) expands on this, describing the Black Canadian masquerader as “catching the African spirit” (p.186), a figure navigating land without limitation, releasing centuries of pent-up energy and anger through movement and celebration.
This spirit of resistance and remembrance is central to the work of Ken Daley and Collette “Miss Coco” Murray, who engage deeply with Carnival traditions through visual and performative art. Daley’s paintings highlight the Moko Jumbie, a towering stilt-walker rooted in West African spirituality, as a symbol of ancestral resilience and diasporic elevation. Murray’s choreography activates rhythm and movement as languages of survival, using live drumming and dance to trace transatlantic ties and reclaim embodied memory. Elevated both physically and symbolically, the Moko Jumbie connects past and present, Africa and the Caribbean, ritual and resistance. Through their work, Daley and Murray offer powerful ways of understanding how belonging is forged through displacement and creativity.
The urgency of such expression is sharpened by the persistent realities of anti-Blackness. Maynard (2017) describes the limitless hostility directed at Black communities and the devaluation of Black life. In Canada, racism operates subtly yet deeply, as Philip (1997) observes: “the currents of racism . . . run deep, they run smooth” (p. 39). Sylvia Wynter reveals how Black existence is excluded from dominant definitions of the human. In this context, Caribana becomes a radical act that transforms public space into a site of Black joy, resistance, and ancestral remembrance.
Saidiya Hartman (2007) writes that the legacy of slavery persists in the afterlife of skewed life chances and incarceration. Caribana responds not with silence, but with sound, movement, and collective joy. The masquerader’s journey through the streets becomes a declaration of presence, a refusal of erasure, and a reclaiming of space. As Ricketts (2024) notes, spirits are able to find release, making the festival a site of embodied resistance and diasporic memory. Through dance, music, and masquerade, Caribana channels grief into celebration and transforms historical rupture into communal affirmation.
This reclamation of history and identity is enacted through radical imagination and artistic resistance. Caribana channels what Mothersill (2023) describes as an ethic of care through music, dance, and masquerade, where bodies in motion become vessels of memory and resistance. Drawing on Caribbean feminist praxis and care ethics, Mothersill describes aliveness as a spiritual, communal, and creative resource that resists erasure and affirms existence. Her concept of “Island care” evokes ancestral practices of nurturing and survival, rooted in land, ritual, and community. The festival insists that Black life is not defined by death or displacement, but by the enduring and imaginative force of aliveness.
The Black and Free project (n.d.), founded by Naila Keleta-Mae, invites Black artists to explore the nuances of Blackness and freedom through creative expression. In the 2023 iteration of Black and Free: New Art, Ken Daley and Collette “Miss Coco” Murray draw on Carnival and Caribana to reimagine diasporic pasts and presents, responding to what Sharpe calls “Black lives being lived under occupation” (Sharpe 2016, p. 22). Their works embody continuity and transformation. Daley’s Moko Jumbies visually map the migration of Carnival from the Caribbean to Canada, embedding symbols of resilience into the Toronto skyline and Carnival figures. His healing spirits affirm that belonging is enacted through joy, ritual, and remembrance. Murray’s Un ‘loc’ de riddims in meh body transforms museum space into a decolonial site of rhythm and resistance, using live drumming and dance to engage ancestral memory and communal movement. Both artists reflect Stuart Hall’s (2019) notion of identity as a process of becoming, by rupture, representation, and creative expression.
By participating in Black and Free: New Art, Daley and Murray demonstrate how Carnival traditions can be reimagined as tools of resistance and cultural continuity. Their works affirm belonging not through assimilation, but through embodied memory and radical celebration. In the following sections, I analyze Moko Jumbies and Un ‘loc’ de riddims in meh body, examining how each artist uses Carnival symbolism and performance to articulate diasporic identity. Together, their practices show that to belong in diaspora is to remember, resist, and reimagine through art, movement, and collective joy.
The Exhibitions
In early 2023, the Black and Free project—founded by Naila Keleta-Mae—launched its inaugural conversation and art presentation series at THEMUSEUM in Waterloo, Ontario. This multidisciplinary initiative invited Black artists to explore expansive visions of Blackness and freedom through creative expression. Among the featured contributors were Ken Daley and Collette “Miss Coco” Murray, two Canadian artists of African-Caribbean descent whose commissioned works offered powerful meditations on diasporic identity.
Ken Daley, born in Cambridge, Ontario to parents from Dominica, blends Caribbean and Canadian influences into a vibrant visual language rooted in music, spirituality, and ancestral memory. His paintings reflect a transnational perspective and have been exhibited across North America and the Caribbean. In his contribution to Black and Free, Moko Jumbies, Daley visually maps the migration of Carnival to Canada, embedding symbols of resilience into the Toronto skyline and Carnival figures. His portrayal of healing spirits affirms that belonging is enacted through joy, ritual, and remembrance.
Collette “Miss Coco” Murray, a Toronto-born artist-scholar with Guyanese and West/Central African heritage, centers Afro-diasporic dance as a form of resistance and cultural reclamation. Through her work as a performer, educator, and founder of Coco Collective, she transforms public and institutional spaces into sites of embodied memory. Her piece, Un ‘loc’ de riddims in meh body, uses Africana dance systems and live polyrhythmic percussion to engage ancestral memory and communal movement. As Murray writes, “Freedom is not conforming to a stage, as Blackness thrives wherever it resides” (CTR, p. 36).
Together, Daley and Murray engage with Carnival and Caribana as cultural and spiritual legacies, using visual art and performance to trace diasporic connections through movement, heritage, and ritual. By invoking Carnival traditions, particularly the figure of the Moko Jumbie, both artists foreground the symbolic and embodied dimensions of belonging, envisioning an unbroken lineage of resistance and celebration.
Caribana, in this context, becomes more than a festival, it is a living archive and a site of storytelling. It allows for the recovery of histories often omitted from dominant narratives and the celebration of ordinary ancestral lives through embodied ritual. As Turner writes, “We stand as a beacon to humanity to recover and reckon with the past to gain the strength and wisdom needed to create the future” (2022, p. 153). Through their work, Daley and Murray demonstrate how Carnival traditions offer diasporic communities the means to resist, remember, and reimagine—affirming belonging as a collective, creative, and liberatory force.
Ken Daley: Paying Homage to the Legacy of Carnival
I wanted to honour the ancestors and celebrate the resilience of the African diaspora through the vibrancy of Carnival. (Ken Daley, Black and Free: New Art; THEMUSEUM/University of Waterloo (Arts), 2023)
Ken Daley’s triptych, created for the Black and Free: New Art series, mobilizes Carnival iconography as a visual archive of diasporic memory, resistance, and belonging. Through expressive figuration and dense symbolic layering, Daley stages Carnival as a living practice through which Black communities assert presence, transmit ancestral knowledge, and imagine liberation across geographies.
The composition centers eight masqueraders in traditional Carnival attire, their dynamic postures and ornamentation choreographing a collective assertion of visibility. Two towering Moko Jumbies bookend the scene. In Caribbean folklore, the Moko Jumbie, derived from West African stilt-dancing traditions, functions as a protective, watchful spirit; its height confers vigilance and the capacity to ward off harm. Daley’s emphasis on their “guardian” function entwines spiritual protection with political visibility, linking ancestral care to the refusal of racial marginalization in contemporary publics.
Between these guardian figures, dancers and masqueraders animate the work’s dramaturgy, including a Jab Molassie, darkly painted, horned, and partially chained, whose bucket spills black pigment. This character, a canonical “devil mas,” historically draws on plantation-era materials (tar, grease, molasses) and performance tactics (aggressive, trance-like gestures) to signify rebellion, social inversion, and the memory of bondage. Jab traditions in Trinidad Carnival articulate a politics of defiance and counter-history, emerging from Afro-Creole reinterpretations of European diabolic imagery and the lived experience of enslaved and post-emancipation communities (Liverpool, 2001).
At the center, five feathered, beaded women in motion suture joy to defiance. Daley describes women as “carriers of rhythm and memory,” foregrounding their role in sustaining cultural knowledge through dance, ritual adornment, and collective performance. In Caribbean contexts, women’s expressive practices have long negotiated the intersecting constraints of slavery, colonialism, and patriarchy; scholarship on dancehall and Carnival locates embodied movement as a site of sexual agency, counter-respectability, and political self-fashioning. Adanna Kai Jones frames the “wining” motion not as mere sensuality but as a political-spiritual technology of memory and survival across Trini-styled Carnivals and diasporic circuits. In this reading, the women in Daley’s triptych are not passive celebrants but active agents of cultural continuity, translating ancestral rhythm into present-tense freedom (Jones, 2020).
The background collage braids cane fields, palms, and water with the Toronto skyline, compressing plantation histories (sugar economy; the Middle Passage) and diasporic routes into a single visual field that locates Black life in Canada within longer colonial genealogies. The juxtaposition resonates with archival and public-history work on enslavement in Upper Canada and the endurance of Black presence in the region, complicating nationalist narratives that erase slavery’s local imprint. By situating Carnival figures in a Canadian urban context, Daley challenges the marginalization of Black expressive culture in public and institutional spaces, echoing how Toronto’s Carnival claims the streets each summer to affirm diasporic belonging and to “make space” for Black Caribbean presence. His use of collage and layering mirrors the multiplicity of Black diasporic life, where migration, resistance, and celebration co-present within everyday urban geographies.
Daley’s artistic philosophy clarifies this synthesis: “Art is what I am,” he writes, linking practice, identity, and heritage (Daley, n.d.). Born in Cambridge, Ontario, to parents from Dominica, Daley’s transnational formation inflects his visual language, which draws on music, spirituality, and personal history to narrate Black creativity across borders. In the Black and Free context specifically, his Moko Jumbies piece explicitly frames Carnival as an expression of Blackness and freedom, paying homage to enslaved and free African ancestors—an aesthetics of memory that is also an ethics of care.
Daley’s triptych ultimately insists that Carnival is more than festivity: it is strategy, survival, and imagination. It is an embodied archive that transforms space, memory, and meaning.
Embodied Resistance and Bodily Agency in Murray’s Un ‘loc’ de riddims in meh body
‘Un’ loc de riddims in meh body is my commissioned research-creation and ancestral duty to enact some of the liberatory practices of J’ouvert, Guinean dance at independence, oral research dissemination, and carnival masquerade as a performing body that is a living archive of ethnocultural dance practices. (Collette “Miss Coco” Murray; CRT, p. 37)
With this declaration, Collette “Miss Coco” Murray’s Un ‘loc’ de riddims in meh body extends the conversation into the realm of embodied performance. Building on her commitment to Afro-diasporic dance as cultural reclamation and resistance, Murray’s work is both a personal offering and a political intervention, an enactment of what she calls her “ancestral duty.” Through stilt dancing, live drumming, and visual storytelling, she enacts a politics of presence—challenging colonial erasure and affirming that Blackness not only survives but thrives wherever it resides. Murray transforms the museum space into a site of diasporic presence and belonging. Collette Murray’s Un ‘loc’ de riddims in meh body stands as a compelling testament to the power of diasporic performance to reclaim space, memory, and agency.
The installation features five collaged photographs documenting Murray’s participation in Carnival across diasporic geographies. These images serve as visual archives, capturing the fluidity of identity through gesture, costume, and rhythm. Each frame invokes ancestral memory and transnational belonging, extending Murray’s choreographic language into still form, where movement, myth, and material culture converge.
Complementing the visual component is a live performance featuring Murray in stilted dance, engaging a Guinean rhythm traditionally performed to celebrate independence. Accompanied by live drumming from the Coco Collective, a multidisciplinary, intergenerational arts ensemble, Murray establishes a call-and-response dynamic that foregrounds communal interaction and sonic embodiment. This rhythmic exchange critiques the isolating nature of pre-recorded sound and affirms the relational ontology of Afro-diasporic performance. As she describes, this interaction is a language of connection, rooted in African cosmologies where the boundary between performer and audience is fluid.
Her choreography bridges generations, invoking ancestral practices while engaging contemporary audiences in acts of collective remembrance. In Murray’s hands, the Moko Jumbie becomes a powerful emblem of diasporic identity reclaimed through movement and myth. Reimagined as both protector and trickster, the figure embodies a lineage of resistance and storytelling. By reclaiming stilt dance from amusement contexts and restoring its cultural significance, Murray asserts Black presence and transforms performance into a living archive, a vessel of history, healing, and hope. In doing so, she reclaims bodily agency and reconfigures public space as a site of radical imagination and belonging.
This reclamation of bodily agency is central to the work’s political force. As Jellisa Ricketts argues, the transatlantic slave trade reduced Black bodies to tools of labor, stripping them of autonomy. Murray’s choreography resists this legacy, reclaiming the body as a site of memory, agency, and liberation. Her performance enacts a transcendental experience, where dance becomes a medium for healing and cultural survival. Murray’s work affirms that despite historical and ongoing violence, Black communities continue to cultivate embodied knowledge through dance in both spiritual and secular spaces. Her dancing also resonates with Adanna Kai Jones’s analysis of wining in Trinidadian Carnival, described as a “politics of movement” rooted in ancestral memory and resistance. Like wining, Murray’s choreography enacts embodied sovereignty, transforming rhythmic motion into a tool for reclaiming space and asserting cultural continuity. Though distinct in form, her stilted movements share this ethos of refusal and reclamation.
In her article Equitable Freedom beyond Proscenium Stages, Murray reflects on the historical criminalization of Black dance in Canada, noting that “social dance expression was considered illegal and a threat to white society, yet African peoples in Canada held cultural memory, orality, movement, and rhythms in their bodies and sought spaces to enact their ways of performance” (2024, p. 33). Her work challenges the devaluation of diasporic dance aesthetics and affirms their pedagogical and political significance. As she writes, “We had to pivot from physical restrictions and restore our pedagogies in galleries, venues, and industries that appropriated our rooted jazz, tap, African and Caribbean folk dance, neo-traditional, and afro-beats/afro-fusion dance aesthetics” (2024, p. 35). Un ‘loc’ de riddims in meh body is part of this pedagogical restoration as an effort to reclaim diasporic movement as a legitimate and liberatory art form.
The museum setting itself becomes a site of decolonial spatial intervention. By staging the performance within a historically colonial institution, Murray reconfigures the space through rhythm and movement, disrupting Western notions of linearity and individualism in art. Audience participation, through clapping, call-and-response, and embodied engagement, reinforces the communal nature of the performance, transforming spectators into co-creators.
Murray’s choreography also engages with the politics of space and visibility. As she writes, “We dance and create everywhere—backyards, community halls, outside in nature, church halls, augmented reality over storefront murals and gardens” (2024, p. 33). Her work animates museum floors, sidewalks, and Carnival routes with ancestral rhythms, reclaiming spaces historically denied to Black bodies. In doing so, she affirms belonging in the present while imagining liberated futures.
Drawing from her Guyanese heritage and broader Afro-Caribbean and West African traditions, Murray enacts a transnational diasporic identity. Her work affirms that Blackness thrives wherever it resides, transforming rhythm and movement into tools of cultural sovereignty and radical imagination. As Toni Morrison urges us to imagine the lives of the enslaved beyond the archive, Murray’s performance becomes a living archive—an embodied refusal of erasure and a celebration of diasporic presence.
Through Un ‘loc’ de riddims in meh body, Murray enacts a politics of presence, reclaiming space and asserting cultural continuity. Her work exemplifies how diasporic art practices sustain memory, foster intergenerational connection, and affirm belonging through embodied expression. It is not only an artistic offering but a political act, one that reclaims the body, the archive, and the public space as sites of Black freedom and futurity.
Results
The analysis of Ken Daley’s and Collette “Miss Coco” Murray’s contributions to the Black and Free art series reveals how both artists reimagine belonging as a dynamic, culturally rooted process shaped by movement, memory, and resistance. Their respective mediums, art and dance, become vehicles for diasporic storytelling, illuminating how Black communities forge connections across time and space through ritual and creative practice.
Together, Daley and Murray position Carnival not as mere festivity but as a framework for diasporic resistance and reassembly. Their works challenge erasure, celebrate survival, and affirm that belonging in diaspora is enacted through continuity, adaptation, and creative practice. By integrating cultural traditions with narratives of transformation, both artists show that artistic expression is instrumental in reclaiming history and imagining liberated futures. Through rhythm, movement, and memory, they assert presence, honor ancestry, and celebrate the enduring power of Black resilience.
Daley and Murray’s interventions demand that we rethink the role of art in public culture. Their practices show that belonging is not static; it is fluid, transnational, and enacted through ritual, cultural memory, and creative expression. This insight challenges institutions to move beyond token inclusion toward structural transformation, Black diasporic aesthetics are not peripheral but central to how we imagine cultural futures. It calls on educators to integrate embodied knowledge and oral histories into curricula, recognizing performance and visual art as critical archives of Black life. It urges policymakers to support platforms where Carnival traditions are not sanitized or commodified but honored as radical practices of freedom.
These works also open deeper theoretical questions: How does diasporic longing operate as praxis, shaping not only community but also imagination? How might the aesthetics of Carnival disrupt colonial logics embedded in cultural institutions? And what does it mean for art to function as a site of world-making, where memory becomes movement and imagination becomes action?
The spaces we inhabit, whether they are museums, streets, classrooms, can be reconfigured as sites of belonging and liberation. The challenge, then, is to ensure that these interventions do not remain isolated gestures but become catalysts for systemic change. Through rhythm, movement, and memory, Daley and Murray’s art models a future where diasporic creativity is not only celebrated but recognized as foundational to the cultural imagination and its praxis.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: I was a research assistant on the Black and Free team from October 2022 to May 2024.