Rodney Saint-Éloi: Writer and Publisher of the “Whole-World”

Rodney Saint-Éloi is one of the most exciting contemporary writers of Haitian origin, and yet his work is little studied in the academic world. Saint-Éloi, who was born in Haiti in 1963 and migrated to Montreal, Canada, in 2001, has maintained a long and distinguished career as an author, publisher, and academic. In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he established the publishing house Editions mémoire in 1991, which supported the dissemination of writers of Haitian origin to the wider world. Once resident in Montreal, he founded Mémoire d’encrier, a dynamic publisher that celebrated its fifteenth anniversary in 2018 and is increasingly defining itself as a cultural center for the production and celebration of diverse literary voices. Alongside his endeavors to foster the values of human dignity through literature, Saint-Éloi has forged his own literary career, primarily through poetry but also through reflective narrative and critical essays. With these dual roles he occupies a unique position as both contributor to and disseminator of a thought-provoking and passionate body of work oriented toward cultural and racial inclusivity. This essay will explore how Saint-Éloi develops certain theoretical concepts elaborated by Édouard Glissant, particularly that of Tout-monde, or the “Whole-World,” as a way to understand his role as a Haitian writer and publisher in a contemporary globalized context.