Rex Nettleford is a well-known Caribbean scholar, trade union educator, social and cultural historian and political analyst. A former Rhodes Scholar, he is Vice Chancellor Emeritus at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. After taking an undergraduate degree in History at the UWI he pursued post-graduate studies in Politics at Oxford. He is also the founder, artistic director and principal choreographer of the internationally acclaimed National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica and is regarded as a leading Caribbean authority in the performing arts.

Poet, playwright, critic, and historian, whose works deal with the complex Caribbean heritage and its African roots. Brathwaite has been a major proponent of the use of "nation language", which is closely allied to the African experience in the Caribbean. It is not dialect or creole merely, but as Brathwaite had defined "the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in".