SOURCE: “The Post-Colonial as Deconstruction: Land and Language in Kroetsch”s Badlands,” in Canadian Literature, No. 128, Spring, 1991, pp. 77-89.

In the following essay, Seaton argues that Kroetsch deconstructs the myths of land and language in Badlands.

It is commonly argued that early imperial discourses of the New World inscribe an effort to make strange new lands familiar to Eurocentric systems of meaning and understanding.¹ However, conceptualised from the start as the site of the strange, the new lands continued to resist European epistemological appropriation and whatever the imperial’s claims to control and knowledge, the sign of the land continued to enter the discourse as a site of the unknown and the resistant.² Now, current criticism often characterises post-colonial writing as constructing counter-discourses to the once-dominant imperial discourse, writing against the imperial’s inappropriately Eurocentric systems of understanding, and instead writing the land as an element within local...