This essay analyzes excessively long speeches in order to argue that circulation naturalizes rhetorical processes that govern meaning within texts. In our view, abundant acts of address unsettle dominant models of speech and circulation, presenting an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between rhetorical forms and circulatory transfigurations. We focus on Strom Thurmond’s twenty-four-hour filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Act and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s 1927 speech to the Turkish Parliament, which lasted thirty-six hours over six days. We bring together these otherwise unrelated long speeches to outline three fictions of text and circulation: textual unity, speaker persona, and implied audience. We argue that these fictions stand in for the excessive address in circulation and, in turn, forms of circulatory abbreviation naturalize rhetorical constructions internal to the speech. In this way, we offer a rhetorical account of circulation that connects textual processes to circulatory forms.

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, which was published to coincide with Ghana’s independence on March 6, 1957. Whereas the political and social imagination of the Anglo-American world during the postwar years was riddled with anxieties concerning the masses, the crowd scenes of Nkrumah’s Ghana elaborate the characteristics of a political community centered on mass society. The article concludes by noting the possibility of a mass civic art culled from the rhetorical tradition of Ghana.