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The Rest is Political: Radical Histories of Repose
This issue of Radical History Review explores how individuals and communities have shaped history through states of repose, slumber, and dreaming, as it assembles a history of the present through the study of the sites of and rights to rest in the past.
Features Hermann von Hesse traces how meanings of home as resting place for living and ancestral kin changed under new commercial relations on Africa’s Gold Coast in the early nineteenth century. Khal Schneider shows how Indigenous Pomo-speakers in late nineteenth-century California countered the colonialist-capitalist division of leisure and work. Allan E. S. Lumba reframes early twentieth-century Filipino migrant workers’ spaces of rest and repose as life-affirming places of communal struggle. Lina Qu contrasts the creative ethos of the contemporary Chinese lying flat movement with enduring ideologies of diligence.
Interventions Yana Skorobogatov draws historical insights from late-Soviet Union propaganda posters chastising workers who shirked their duties. Hamed Khosravi explores liberatory laziness as a theme in artistic and architectural works. Lauren Michelle Levesque, Josh Clendenin, and Carl Stewart discuss the use of lying down and standing still in protests. Mali D. Collins and Lauren N. Whitehurst converse about disrupted sleep and self-care through a historically informed Black feminist lens. Ynaê Lopes dos Santos reveals chronic exhaustion as a constant in Black Brazilian women’s history.
Curated Spaces Melissa Story explores the relationship between overwork, rest, and artistic expression in the paintings of Minnie Evans. Sarah Dowling reads the transformational possibilities of rest posed by Cree artist Brenda Draney’s idling figures.
Archives of Dreams Ty and Hannah Proctor argue that dreaming and sleeping are integral to histories of collective struggle and world-making. Terry Williams recounts his research with subterranean unhoused people in New York City who recorded their dreams. Bohdan Shumylovych creates an archive of dreams amid Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Cover: “Sleeping Girl,” an image from the United States Work Progress Administration, c. 1939. Riva Helfond (artist). Lithograph. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library.
