Rex Nettleford

Ralston Milton "Rex" Nettleford OM OCC FIJ (3 February 1933 – 2 February 2010) was a Jamaican scholar, social critic, choreographer, and Vice-Chancellor Emeritus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), the leading research university in the Commonwealth Caribbean.

Biography Rex Nettleford was born on February 3, 1933 in Falmouth, Jamaica, Nettleford attended Unity Primary School in Bunkers Hill, Trelawny, and graduated from Cornwall College in Montego Bay, before going to the University of the West Indies (UWI) to obtain an honours degree in history. As a child, he sang and recited in school concerts, sang in the church choir, danced, and began working as a choreographer at the age of 11 with the Worm Chambers Variety Troupe, which helped to fund his studies. He was a recipient of the 1957 Rhodes Scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford, where he received a postgraduate degree in Politics, returning to Jamaica in the early 1960s to take up a position at UWI. an ensemble which under his direction did much to incorporate traditional Jamaican music and dance into a formal balletic repertoire. He was unconscious and in a coma for several days. On Tuesday, 2 February 2010, he was pronounced dead at around 8:00pm EST.

Nettleford died one day before his 77th birthday. He suffered a serious brain injury while he was in cardiac arrest. He was in Washington for a meeting with the United Nations to discuss the state of racial discrimination around the world, and had been expected to meet in New York with his former employer, University of the West Indies, for a fundraising event. Nettleford was an important individual to the extramural studies department at University of the West Indies and was also an advisor to political leaders in the Caribbean.

Legacy In 2004, the Rhodes Trust established the Rex Nettleford Prize in cultural studies.

The Rex Nettleford Foundation was established after his death. Nettleford's life was the subject of a trilogy of films by Lennie Little-White, commissioned by the foundation.

Selected bibliography Roots and Rhythms: the Story of the Jamaican National Dance Theatre (1969), London: Deutsch. Mirror, Mirror: Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica (1970), Kingston: Sangster and Collins. African Connexion: Parallels; Historical Continuity; Panafricanism; African in the World, University of the West Indies (1972).