(R)Evolutionary Cultural Literacy: Pauli Murray’s Boundary-Crossing Tripartite Pedagogy

<p>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.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Philosophy, PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Open Access Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

School of Arts and Humanities

Year dc:date.available

2026

Author dc:creator

• Diamond, Lorise Ann

Contributors dc:contributor

• Eve Oishi
• Clayton Colmon

• Black Feminism
• Critical Pedagogy
• Cultural Rhetoric
• Humanism
• Queer Studies
• Transnational Feminism
• Rhetoric and Composition

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/1094

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cgu_etd-2116