Offering research on Mikhail Bakhtin by leading scholars, this volume both celebrates the centennial of Bakhtin’s birth and elaborates significant strains in Bakhtin thinking. The distinction between Bakhtin and Bakhtin is a measure of incommensurable space between the biographically verifiable figure and the one who emerges from contemporary critical applications of his work. The implications for a politics of culture where theory is concerned is discussed and questions are addressed, such as can there be a real Bakhtin, and can this one simply be the relevant Bakhtin? Is the deified Bakhtin just a reified Bakhtin? The contributors tackle this theorist’s range of shifting shapes and Bakhtin’s texts are examined in the context of work by such disparate figures as Ernst Cassirer and Rudolph Rocker. Throughout the issue, the author and archive are continually deconstructed and reconstructed.