"Starting from the historical shift in the meaning of the term ‘Third World’, I am interested in understanding how specific knowledge systems operate and what sort of frames they presuppose and further create. For that purpose, I would like to problematize the way in which development became in the 20th century as central a concept as civilization was in the 19th century, weaving an interpretive grid through which the postcolonial world became known to us.

Approaching closer the historical post-World War II moment in the United States, I would like to suggest an analysis of development through Foucault’s model of apparatus. In an effort to articulate some of the elements of this apparatus, I would like to look at the Point Four Program (a technical assistance program for ‘underdeveloped areas’) in 1949 Truman’s inaugural address and modernization theory. Examining specifically the case of the Peace Corps program, which translated social theory to policy, I want to show the way in which discourse creates realities by focusing especially on the role of the image and desire.

Countering the economic and social theorists’ rhetoric of ‘traditional society’ being static, stagnant, dormant, I want to propose for this analysis a sonic equivalent and ask how voicing over silences overrides other possibilities."