The review Tropiques was produced in Martinique during the years of the Second World War. Its principal aim was to establish the autonomy and specificity of French Caribbean culture on equal terms with that of Europe; although it never had a large readership, it marked an important moment in the intellectual and literary history of the region. Its editors were Aimé and Suzanne Césaire and René Ménil, who were at the time teachers at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France; they had recently returned to Martinique from Paris, where Ménil had been active in Marxist and surrealist circles, while Aimé Césaire had, together with the Senegalese Léopold Senghor, founded what was to become the Negritude movement. All of these influences shaped the orientation of Tropiques, although the strict political censorship operated until 1943 by the Vichy regime in Martinique meant that Marxism was less overtly prominent than surrealism and Negritude. Negritude's commitment to the promotion of a collective ‘black’ identity, reconnecting Antilleans with their African roots, came together with surrealism's enthusiasm for l'art nègre and primitive cultures to produce an interest in a primitivist literature characterized by the instinctual, the supernatural, the irrational, closeness to nature and the spontaneous expression of untrammeled emotion rather than intellectual subtlety or sophisticated literary form. All of these qualities were attributed to Africa, which for Tropiques assumed the role of a figure of unproblematic primitivity.

But after André Breton's famous unscheduled visit to the island in 1941, it was surrealism that was the most obvious influence on the review. Michel Leiris suggests that for Antillean intellectuals such as Ménil at this time, ‘Le surréalisme apparut – sur le plan esthétique et, plus largement, psychologique – comme susceptible de les aider à surmonter une complexe d'infériorité’ (p. 108); and argues that whereas previously they had felt obliged to conform to European cultural values, surrealism's rejection of these values enabled them to ‘retrouver une authenticité’ (p. 108) that was inseparable from their racial identity as people of African descent. Thus, Leiris goes on, in Tropiques, ‘Aimé Césaire et ses amis mettront très fortement l'accent sur l'importance de la composante négro-africaine dans la culture antillaise’ (p. 109). But while he is sympathetic to this project, Leiris emphasizes the point that surrealism, like Negritude, was incapable of providing a basis for the political liberation of the Martinican people, which was the most important issue.