Inicati T IS ALMOST CUSTOMARY NOW TO study development and the role of communication in development from certain standard theoretical perspectives such as modernization, dependency, and postdevelopment perspectives. At various historical junctures, each of these perspectives has offered a wealth of explanations and/or prescriptions for “development,” an ideology that has generated a way of thinking about the world in two broad categories—of advanced and backward nations. The framework and parameters in which development communication dialogue, policy, and practice take place is the discourse of development that works to articulate an ideology that has been normalized in the international vocabulary. My concern in this chapter is to attempt to step outside the frameworks in which communication and development have been debated for the better part of the past four to five decades or so and to understand how this concept has been produced and elevated to the status of, in Žižek's (1993) term, a “master signifier" by examining the historical trajectory of communication and development as a discourse. To this end, I suggest an alternative framework located at the intersection of critical cultural studies and poststructuralism. This framework is mindful of the critique posed by postcolonial scholars such as Spivak, who acknowledge the global applicability of these theories, but question the absence of the constitutive role of empire and the colony in the study of discourses emerging from these theoretical traditions. For example, Slater cites Spivak's objection to Foucault's Eurocentric, or more closely, Francocentric archaeological foci that have prevented a “reading of the broader narratives of imperialism.... To buy a self-contained version of the west is to