Date of Award
2026
Degree Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Philosophy, PhD
Program
School of Arts and Humanities
Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair
Darrell Moorer
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Eve Oishi
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Clayton Colmon
Terms of Use & License Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Rights Information
© 2026 Lorise Ann Diamond
Keywords
Black Feminism, Critical Pedagogy, Cultural Rhetoric, Humanism, Queer Studies, Transnational Feminism
Subject Categories
Rhetoric and Composition
Abstract
Civil rights lawyer, poet, activist, questioning, and Episcopal priest Pauli Murray spent seven decades generating legal doctrine, autobiography, poetry, and institutional redesign across some of the most hostile yet fecund terrain American public life produced. Scholarship across rhetoric and writing studies, cultural studies, Black feminism, and critical pedagogy has theorized literacy, movement, and commons-making as separate concerns. What the field of cultural literacy lacks is a framework that holds those concerns together, reads them through a focused body of texts, and translates them into a transferable pedagogy applicable across academic, civic, and institutional settings. This dissertation argues that cultural literacy functions as a lived, relational practice rather than a fixed body of credentialed content. Against dominant models that treat knowledge as inventory, this project advances (R)Evolutionary Cultural Literacy, a tripartite framework organized around world-reading, world-traveling, and world-growing. The parenthetical "R" holds evolution and revolution in productive tension: sustainable transformation requires both the gradual unrolling of cultural capacity and the deliberate overturning of structures that consign whole communities to the bottom of the social order. Murray's Proud Shoes, Song in a Weary Throat, States' Laws on Race and Color, and collected poetry constitute what this dissertation calls embodied pedagogy: teaching enacted through flesh, motion, and daily practice. This project reads across four genres: family narrative, autobiography, legal compilation, and poetry, treating each as a legitimate site of knowledge production. Method follows skill lines rather than timelines, tracking how Murray accumulated, tested, and transmitted cultural literacies across scenes of constraint, with embodied testimony carrying evidence on par with doctrine. Framework, texts, and method together generate four revolutions: ontological, rewriting who counts as a fully authorized human being; epistemic, insisting that marginalized communities already hold sophisticated interpretive systems; teleological, holding queerness as a horizon, the "then and there" that refuses the present as terminus; and social, building commons governed by negotiated norms of care and shared stewardship. Murray named the animating ethic vigorous love: a disciplined, relentless care that reads power, crosses hostile terrain without mimicking its violence, and seeds livable alternatives even when the soil appears poisoned.
ISBN
9798244884944
Recommended Citation
Diamond, Lorise Ann. (2026). (R)Evolutionary Cultural Literacy: Pauli Murray’s Boundary-Crossing Tripartite Pedagogy. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 1094. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/1094.
