Eunjae ThompsonUndergraduate Humanities Honors Fellow

Eunjae Thompson is a senior studying Philosophy and Religion with a minor in History.

Their honors thesis in the Emory Philosophy Department, titled “Beyond Capture: Blackened Piety & the Politics of Refusal,” will interrogate how the life-writing genre not only illuminates but draws the boundaries of the human condition, wielding the power to police the same sacred and profane logics that scaffold colonial, racial, and theological hierarchies. Drawing on the insights of Black thinkers and philosophers like Georges Bataille, they seek to mobilize an ambivalent notion of the sacred as a tool for exposing and exploding the site of struggle where the very definition of ‘life’ is contested and redrawn. Their work reframes contemporary, sacral Black aesthetic practices as a living archive—a constellation of life stories that disrupt and resist the ‘sacred’ social arrangements intent on containing and capturing life lived at the margins and whether it may call for something like Blackened piety.