The voice of propaganda

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Vietnam’s vibrant capital Hanoi, this article asks why attempts to use moralising public iconography as talking points with research collaborators can so often have a silencing effect on otherwise voluble interlocutors. It is proposed that these are moments of agentive silence, where the muting of a vocal self can be an act of moral will, not the crushing of agency and voice. It is therefore suggested that there can be more to a silent self than the effect of a censor’s power to control or extinguish speech, especially in contexts where state propaganda can work both visually and textually to repress as well as authorise a citizen’s expressive voice.