Aimé Césaire’s 1939 publication Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to My Native Land] marked a turning point in French Caribbean literature. Prior to 1930 literary works from the region were characterized by European models and tended towards exoticism. Césaire’s groundbreaking poem laid the foundations for a new literary style in which Caribbean writers came to reject the alienating gaze of the Other in favour of their own Caribbean interpretation of reality. This decisive ideological shift found expression in the political, philosophical and literary theory of négritude. First appearing in 1935, the journal L’Etudiant noir

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