"The power to create and innovate remains the greatest guarantee of respect and recognition."
Nettleford 1970:227
Biography: The Formation of a Caribbean Intellectual
Rex Nettleford, a leading Caribbean intellectual visionary and renaissance figure, was born on February 3rd, 1933 in the rural town of Falmouth, Jamaica. Enveloped by the folklore of the rural hinterlands of Jamaica and the natural integration of music and movement in life, Nettleford cultivated an acute sensibility to the creative ingenuity and resilience evidenced in the collective intellect of the black rural community. His creative imagination was fostered by an immersion in the daily rhythms of country life, and invested him with a keen appreciation for the dynamic process of creolisation as witnessed in diverse religious practices, eclectic music traditions and resistant speech patterns. These "homegrown" articulations of Jamaican identity were constructed out of the meeting of Africa and Europe on Caribbean soil and stand as testament to the innovative cultural vitality of the region. It is this quality of cultural tenacity on the part of the Afro-creolised populations that Nettleford holds in great esteem and which serves as the nodal point through which he formulates his ideas concerning Caribbean identity in the postcolonial milieu.
Nettleford was educated, as most budding scholars of his generation,
in the local appendages of the British colonial intelligentsia. Trained
first at the Cornwall College in Montego Bay, he went on to pursue a history
degree at The University College of
the West Indies (London University) before moving on to postgraduate
studies in politics as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. Although
highly educated and versed in the social mores and language of the British
imperial crown, Nettleford never lost site of his commitment to his native
home and the promotion of its national vernacular culture. At a time when
the country's most talented and educated peoples were being siphoned off
to fill the ivory towers and corporate offices in the metropolis, Nettleford
returned to his island home and launched a public intellectual and artistic
career whose effects reverberated throughout the Caribbean basin and its
diasporic communities.
Many have argued that Rex Nettleford's location as a "third-world"
scholar, operating from the periphery of the Western academy, has hindered
the wholesale readership and international acclaim of his works. But for
Nettleford, the work of the "organic intellectual" begins at home, and
thus his commitment is first and foremost "to the preparation of a citizenry
ready for participation in the political, social and economic processes
of its country" (1970:229). The task of the Caribbean and/or "third-word",
postcolonial intellectual is to redress the perceived and accepted notion
that by definition, nothing creative could come out of the colonies. The
first means of accomplishing this task is through working with the masses
on their native soil and in their native tongue and by utilizing indigenous
epistemologies for examining cultural phenomena and processes that are
the lived reality of Caribbean citizens. Nettleford's Caribbean compatriots,
Stuart Hall and Derek Walcott continue to open
a space for critical scholarship on the Caribbean and contribute significantly
to the intellectual climate of diverse communities. Their location in the
metropolitan centers of North America and Britain, affords them access
to a broader community of transnational postcolonial subjects, but it has
also moved them away from the local articulations of nationhood, identity
and cultural development as experienced and negotiated in the Caribbean
territories. Nettleford thus provides a voice from within the region that
later becomes the source of dialogue for those in the metropolis.
Nettleford's importance to the Caribbean and for Caribbean nationals living across the globe derives from the fact that his master project has been the decolonisation of the Caribbean spirit and imagination. His writings, lectures and choreographies reflect a profound conviction in the creative power of the peoples of the region, a power struggling to unleash itself from the conjunction of historical and neo-colonial forces. The commitment to contesting the idea of the colonial found expression through the creation of an indigenous dance form promoted by the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica (NDTC), Nettleford co-founded and has been artistic director since 1963. As former professor of Extramural Studies at the University of the West Indies Mona, Jamaica, Nettleford directed the University's Adult Education Programme, which afforded thousands of men, and women throughout the anglophone Caribbean access to higher education. As founder of the Trade Union Education Institute, through which factory and estate workers interface with scholars at the highest seat of learning, Nettleford aimed to bridge the divide between the classes and bring theory in closer proximity to praxis. Nettleford's scholastic achievements culminated with his 1998 appointment as Chancellor of the University of the West Indies.
"The hidden history of Jamaica is here seen as the history of the struggle
of the African component to emerge from the subterranean caverns into which
it has been forced." --Nettleford 1970:194
The Poetics and Politics of Caribbean Cultural Identity — The Works of Rex Nettleford
The centrality of the experiences of Caribbean peoples and their struggles for intellectual, cultural and political independence has remained pivotal to Nettleford's intellectual and artistic engagements over the past thirty years. The seeds of his future articulations on Caribbean cultural identity were, however, sowed in his first acclaimed publication, Mirror, Mirror: Race, Identity and Protest in Jamaica (1970). Set in the turbulent context of the newly independent Jamaica of the 1960s, Nettleford holds a mirror up to Jamaican society and reveals the schizophrenic and ambivalent relation black Jamaicans have towards their identities as national subjects. The three critical variables of race, identity and protest constitute, for Nettleford, a trinity that "closely interact[s] in the social evolution of contemporary Jamaica" (1970:10), which he situates along a trajectory of lessons and legacies acquired from the time of Emancipation. The quest for identity forms a critical nexus around which the newly independent citizenry has tried to come to terms with the legacies of colonialism and the anxieties of self-governance. At the center of the anxiety is a psychic split between the cultural traces of a fragmentary African heritage that the overwhelming black majority inherited, and the simultaneous desire to renounce that heritage and identify with the cultural symbols of the white/brown ruling elite. The multi-racial nationalist ethic is thus predicated on this dissonant state of in-betweeness and half-identification (21) and serves to keep the new nation in a constant state of schizophrenia. For Nettleford, Caribbean nationalisms all fall victim to this splintered sense of self because for the most part newly independent Caribbean countries have all bought into a hybrid, creolisation model that valorizes assimilation away from a historical antecedent of slavery and Africa into a Euro-Creolized New World heritage. The mimicry of European cultural values and aesthetics is therefore a day to day reality for postcolonial subjects who are heir to an ideology of creolisation manifested in a valorization of Europe. Thus, in his critical examination of post-colonial Caribbean societies and artistic endeavors, Nettleford aims to unearth and hone an Afro-creolised aesthetics towards emancipatory ends (1995:30-70).
During
this volatile time of self-definition, Nettleford expressed a commitment
to articulating and making accessible the cause of minority groups, (i.e.
notably Rastafarians) in the face of what he calls "the underlying lack
of social conscience among the more fortunate classes in Jamaica" (54).
In an attempt to deflect the nations prominent preoccupation with European
aesthetics and cultural attributes, Nettleford turned towards an intellectual
engagement with the social pariah of Jamaican and Caribbean society at
the time -- the Rastafarian. The Rastafarian's brandishing of the symbol
of protest against Babylon and European hegemony was worn on their heads,
with the growing of locks, released from their tongues, through the creation
of a new indigenized creole lexicon, and embodied in their walk, which
valorized the kings and queens of a regal African lineage. The significance
of their presence in the pivotal moment of Jamaica's independence cannot
be underestimated as Nettleford has indicated:
"More generally the role of the Rastafarians has been to bring to the
attention of the Jamaican society the urgent need to root identity and
national cohesion in
a recognition of the origins of its black majority and to redress the imbalance
of history's systematic weakening of any claim to achievement which descendants
of Africans would otherwise make in the New World. In this they have been
a revitalizing force, albeit a discomforting and disturbing one" (110).
These qualities of defiance and self-determination are what illustrate
the resilience and creative ingenuity of the Jamaican people and it is
what Nettleford seeks to express, make accessible and foster among the
masses.
Nettleford's subsequent work on Caribbean culture includes Caribbean Cultural Identity (1978) and his 1995 collection of essays, Inward Stretch, Outward Reach: A Voice from the Caribbean. Both of these works begin with the premise that culture constructed from the lived experiences and realities of Caribbean peoples are to serve as the principle means of constructing a cohesive national and regional identity and also the prime vehicle for economic development.
"The creative artist understands as part of his stock-in-trade the dialectical process expressed in the struggle between the forces of colonialism and liberation, between domination and the spirit of self determination." --Nettleford 1978
The Creative Imagination and Creative Intellect — Nettleford as Artist
In discussing Rex Nettleford's intellectual achievements and contributions to the cultural and sociopolitical landscape of the Caribbean we must also acknowledge his longstanding active role in artistic productions throughout the Caribbean basin, but specifically with the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica (NDTC). Three years after the start of Walcott's Trinidad Theatre Workshop, the historical experiences of Caribbean struggle and survival and the condition of postcoloniality, found expression in the rhythmic kinesthetic vocabulary formulated in the organic choreography of NDTC. In the wake of Jamaica's independence, August 6, 1962, Rex Nettleford and Eddy Thomas founded a company of unpaid dancers, musicians, designers, technicians who were to become the cultural ambassadors of not only Jamaica, but also the Caribbean. As artistic director, principal choreographer, and former lead dancer of the NDTC, Nettleford introduced the Jamaican masses to the indigenous practices of Kumina (an ancestral veneration religion), Pocomania (an Afro-Christian syncretic religious expression) and the rich folk music traditions from across the island. Thus, he catapulted these creative cultural expressions out of the realm of the obscure to venerated national icons of ingenuity and survival. The theatrical stage became the forum in which the movement vocabulary and aesthetics found in the indigenous rituals and dances of rural Jamaica were visibly asserted, reformulated and reinterpreted by performers and audiences alike. Moreover, their continued presence in the company's repertoire speaks of the centrality of an Afro-creolised sensibility in the Caribbean ethos.
Nettleford's belief in the organic connection between the arts of a people, their everyday life and their historical experiences is continuously given voice in choreography that affirms the varied cultural symbols the Jamaican people have acquired and reformulated. For Nettleford, the arts are a great source of cultural survival and resistance and should be cultivated to promote awareness of self and social change, "for the creative imagination lies beyond the reach of the vilest oppressor" (1985:15). This notion of creativity, that lives in the "belly bottom" of the nation's children, is what has brought Jamaica international acclaim and it is what will continue to forge a Caribbean cultural identity imbued with the history of struggle, survival and resistance.
"Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it." --Fanon 1963:206.
International Organizations and Honors
Nettleford's intellectual and artistic contributions to the issues of black identity in the Western world as well as his understanding of the role of culture and development, has earned him great respect throughout the Americas Europe and Africa. He is chairman of London's Commonwealth Arts Organization, a member of the Executive Board of UNESCO, chairman of the International Council on the University Adult Education, and founding and longest-serving Governor of the International Development Research Council (Ottawa). Professor Nettleford has also served as consultant on cultural development to the Organization of American States.
Rex Nettleford has received many honours and awards for his work. His compatriots honoured him in 1975 with the national honor of Order of Merit (O.M.). He is the recipient of the Gold Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica, the Living Legend Award for the Black Arts Festival, Atlanta U.S.A. The Institute of Jamaica named him a Fellow in 1991, the fourth time it has awarded this honor in its more than 100-year history and the University he serves has recognized his extraordinary talent by presenting him with the coveted Pelican Award. In 1994, he received the Zora Neale Hurston-Paul Robeson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement from the National Council for Black Studies, USA.
Works by Rex Nettleford
Editor
of Caribbean Quarterly — The region's oldest journal
The Rastafarians in Kingston Jamaica (with M.G. Smith & F.R. Augier).
Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. 1967.
Mirror, Mirror: Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica. Kingston: William
Collins and Sangster Jamaica Ltd. 1970
Manley and the New Jamaica. Jamaica: Longman Caribbean. 1971
Caribbean Cultural Identity. Los Angeles: UCLA IOB. 1978
Dance Jamaica: Cultural Definition and Artistic Discovery. New York:
Grove Press. 1985
The University of the West Indies: A Caribbean Response to the Challenge
of Change (with Phillip Sherlock). Kingston: University of the West Indies
Press. 1987.
Inward Stretch Outward Reach: A Voice from the Caribbean. New York:
Caribbean Diasporic Press Inc. Medgar Evers College CUNY. 1995
Jamaica in Independence: The Early Years (Editor) Kingston: Heinneman.
1988
Race, Discourse and the Origins of the Americas (Co-edited with Vera
Hyatt). Washington D.C. Smithsonian Institution Press. 1995.
Works Cited
Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove
Press Inc.
Nettleford, Rex. 1970. Mirror, Mirror: Identity, Race and Protest
in Jamaica. Kingston: William Collins and Sangster Jamaica Ltd.
---.1985. Dance Jamaica: Cultural Definition and Artistic Discovery.
New York: Grove Press
---. 1995. Inward Stretch Outward Reach: A Voice from the Caribbean.
New York: Caribbean Diasporic Press Inc. Medgar Evers College CUNY.
Photos were published in Dance Jamaica 1985 and Caribbean Cultural
Identity 1978.
Related Works on Creolisation and Rastafari include:
Bolland, Nigel, O. 1992. "Creolization and Creole Societies: A Cultural
Nationalist View of Caribbean Social History." In Intellectuals in the
Twentieth-Century Caribbean, vol. 1, Spectre of the New Class: The Commonwealrh
Caribbean, ed Alistar Hennesey, 50-79. London: Macmillan.
Braithwaite, Kamau, E. 1971. The Development of Creole Society in
Jamaica, 1770-1820. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Burton, Richard D.E. 1997. Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition and Play
in the Caribbean. Ithaca: Cornell University Press
Chevannes, Barry. 1994. Rastafari Roots and Ideology. Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press
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