Reclaiming Lyceums: New York City’s Forgotten Rhetorical Legacy

Co-led by Greylin Jones, a management consultant and social justice worker in Central Brooklyn, and Mudiwa Pettus, a rhetoric scholar and Assistant Professor at Medgar Evers College, Reclaiming Lyceums: New York City’s Forgotten Rhetorical Legacy is a civic education program that sponsors community members’ experimentation in the rhetorical arts. We define rhetorical arts as the creative uses of language and other communicative resources, such as film, music, memorials, and bodily expression, to influence or to initiate understanding. Therefore, while rhetoric is often framed as shallow language, we understand it to be a vehicle for diverse groups of people to constitute themselves as mutually invested in each others’ wellbeing and to maintain channels of communication even when possessing conflicting viewpoints. Accordingly, Greylin sees Reclaiming Lyceums as an opportunity to further support the communities he has engaged as a cultural heritage preservationist in investigating the issues that matter to them, and Mudiwa hopes to use the fellowship to pursue real-time analyses of communities’ effort to engage in constructive public deliberation.

With funds provided by the SPCUNY Faculty Fellowship, Greylin and Mudiwa will sponsor three lyceum groups whose members will engage in constructive dialogue about topics animating their communities. The groups are as follows: a group exploring 19th-century Black Queer histories, led by Riah Kinsey; a group deliberating divergent definitions of Black freedom, facilitated by Greylin; and a group experimenting with a 7-minute-7-person performance method, created by Miles McAfee and co-ran with Lou Miller. Through the support of the fellowship, each group will receive start-up funds to purchase supplies that will support their group’s distinctive methods and methodology for deliberation. Mudiwa and Greylin will serve as administrators and participants in the lyceum groups, with Greylin facilitating one.