SOURCE: Peterson, Dale E. “Response and Call: The African American Dialogue with Bakhtin.” American Literature 65, no. 4 (December 1993): 761-775.

In the following essay, Peterson draws parallels between Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and Henry Louis Gates's work on the “double-voicedness” of African-American literature.

Although it has taken twenty years to achieve, an exotic and somewhat rough-hewn Soviet import is now in great demand on the volatile commodities and exchange market that constitutes contemporary critical discourse. Yet even as Slavic scholars have dared announce the arrival in the West of “the age of Bakhtin,” they have, with understandable caution, wondered out loud about the shelf-life of this hastily consumed and culturally distant product.¹ Beginning in 1968 with the English translation of Rabelais and His World, and accelerating in 1973 with the first American editions of Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and V. N. Voloshinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Anglo-American literary criticism...