Nobel Conference Lecture - Sleep and Inequality: A HistoryOctober 2 at 1–1:45 p.m.

Nobel Conference Sixth Lecture

Sleep and Inequality: A History

Benjamin Reiss
Professor of English
Emory University

Sleep is one of the last freely available natural resources, yet our society sleeps unequally. Sleep researchers have studied how such factors as the stress of navigating a racist society, exposure to environmental hazards, inflexible or irregular work schedules, and perceived lack of safety can affect sleep health. This presentation will show that humanities scholars can uncover the deep historical roots connecting social disadvantage, stigma, and poor sleep. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans defined a supposedly “civilized” bourgeois lifestyle in terms of privacy and comfort. These values took architectural form in a newly invented household space known as the bedroom. During the same period, supposedly “uncivilized” people were denied access to the privacy and comforts of middle-class sleep. For instance, factory workers were lodged by the dozen in boarding houses, and the sleep of prisoners and mental patients was routinely monitored and tightly controlled by authorities. Most unequal was the sleep of enslaved people, who were packed tightly into unhygienic holds of transatlantic slave ships, where they slept fitfully in chains. When they arrived in the Americas, they were subjected to heavy nighttime surveillance, sexual assaults under cover of darkness, and the use of intentional sleep deprivation as a tool of control. For those who managed to escape, night was still a time of great fear and restlessness: “vigilance committees” across the North organized round-the-clock watchers to patrol the streets and ward off slave catchers. These stories, and their connection to present-day sleep disturbances, indicate that when we lie in bed at night—sleeping or waking—we are not escaping history, but entering one of its hidden chambers.