Mikhail Bakhtin: The Politics of Language and Genre Badri Raina ALTHOUGH Mikhail Bakhtin's work dates from the 1920s, it is only with the publication in 1981 of The Dialogical Imagination [originally as four essays in Voprosy literatury i estetiki, Moscow, 1975] that Bakhtin has become an important new factor in the debate on cultural production and critical theory.1 Western scholarship is busily catching up with him, although book-length studies are not yet numerous.2 Much of this catching-up has to do with a readjustment and relocation of positions with respect of language/meaning, form/signification, genre/interpretation—positions that are handed down both from structural linguistics [and structural theorization generally], and from post-structuralist extensions and reversals of structuralism at various points. Within the Marxist theory also, Bakhtin has caused a revision of aesthetic postulations that held ground between the 1930s and the 1970s [Lukacs to Goldmann]. It is obvious at first sight itself that to the interested third-world practitioner of criticism/evaluation—dt least to a sect, one that will hopefully grow and prosper—Bakhtin offers very welcome new ground after the historically less appropriatable [in fact, historically alienating} tendencies of structuralist and post-structuralist thought, even after one has counted the value of their critique of earlier critical practices [such as of Formalism and American New Criticism]. For a start, Bakhtin's great strength seems his avowal everywhere that the shaping of experience into specific language styles and genres is essentially a process of the transformation of lived control-mechanisms into aesthetics. Rooting himself openly in a matrix of the ideologies of the historically neglected, Bakhtin is well-placed to dethrone the particular mediations of other ideologies and Journal of Arts and Ideas 65