ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with postcolonial efforts to create decolonized national and cultural identities, and with the intersection of these efforts and the literary avant-garde's fragmentation and decentering of the subject. National culture as resistance to colonization is often formed as a search for origins, that is, a struggle to recover a culture that colonialism has distorted or effaced. One of the problems with this search for plenitude and for continuity with the past is that it tends to suppress difference(s) within the nation. As modernists interrogate nationalism and the notion of cultural identities, it is important as well to be wary of intense interrogation. De Andrade Oswald's program has been taken by such influential critics as Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Haroldo de Campos as both an ideal and an accurate representation of Brazilian culture, mainly because it posits a nationalism that avoids xenophobia and a nation that is heterogeneous rather than univocal.
