With this study, Peter Hitchcock takes up Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's vexed question, "Can the subaltern speak?" and develops a complex affirmative response through Bakhtinian theory and readings of four twentieth-century feminist writers. His project is aimed both at depoliticized appropriations of Bakhtin and, more broadly, at the institutional tendency of the "metropolitan 'First World' academy" (xi) to reproduce structures of domination and "othering" in its treatment of writings by marginalized or subaltern peoples. In the process, Hitchcock provides a compelling introduction to the work of writers little known in American universities: Nawal el Saadawi (Egypt), Pat Barker (United Kingdom), Zhang Jie (China), and Agnes Smedley (United States)