“People continue to make history while resting”: an interview with historian Amy Chazkel
The night is more than just the end of the day. It has its own history and tells us a great deal about work, power, and society. Rest is never simply a private matter, it can be instrumentalized as a tool for social control. We spoke with historian Amy Chazkel, author of the forthcoming book The Politics of Nightfall, about what sleep and rest can tell us about life today and in the past.
Is it correct to say that research on the night and on rest has expanded significantly over the last decade? If so, what explains it?
Historically, people wrote about the night without making it the actual object of analysis. For example, Judith Walkowitz, a great historian of 19th-century England, writes beautifully about the urban night, but her ultimate focus lies elsewhere. Recently, scholars have begun pulling insights out of previous works to show that the night isn't just a static background – it has a history of its own.
That is why my book is titled The Politics of Nightfall. It intentionally uses a counterintuitive framing. How could something like the night have a politics? How could it be the object or subject of power and authority? I hope to show that this is a useful way of thinking about both politics and the night.
This also extends to sleep and rest. There is a general global recognition that we are experiencing a massive societal “speed-up” that no single person can step away from. Beyond the multidisciplinary recognition of a public health and social crisis involving overwork, there is a growing realization that sleep and rest aren't times when people simply step out of history – they continue to make history while resting. The debates around how, when, where, and if people are entitled to rest are incredibly powerful.
Why do you think authors and historians are taking this so personally now? Is it a symptom of our “burnout age”?
Absolutely. The expectations imposed on people for work and our capacity for truly restorative time away from it are completely out of balance. Most of us spend our days off dealing with bureaucratic tasks, family obligations, or errands. The idea of just staring into the horizon or doing something purely to nourish the soul has been squeezed out. This overwork is so embedded in how society functions that the only way to end it would be for everyone universally and simultaneously to say “no” to such a regime. And no one can afford to do that individually. Doing so alone puts you at a disadvantage in the competition for resources, status, and power.
Overwork is a structural social problem, not an individual failing. In the USA, we’ve seen a dramatic erosion of collective bargaining and unions, especially within academia, which intensifies this.
Interestingly, when we put out a public call for submissions for our thematic issue of Radical History Review, “The Rest is Political: Radical Histories of Repose,” we got a number of powerful submissions by and about Black women. The authors took the opportunity of this issue to think about the intergenerational burden of overwork and the acute need for rest. People are using a historical frame to understand their lives today.
It seems rest is not a given; it has a deeply political dimension. Could you elaborate on how rest and sleep are used as tools of politics?
Rest and sleep frequently become the basis for forms of dissent and protest. Scholars, activists, and artists are analyzing how people performatively use rest as a political language. Examples include the “lying flat” movement or the “die-ins” commonly used by HIV/AIDS rights movements in the 1980s in the US. Even in recent US campus protests against war in Gaza, using the tools and gestures of sleep – like pitching tents – serves as a powerful form of protest.
Conversely, there is a cruel irony to the politics of exhaustion: people who are exhausted have a harder time participating in politics. Extreme exhaustion stifles the creativity, vitality, and mental freedom required for political intervention, artistic creation, and long-term planning. When studying past and present dissenting movements, we have to look at exhaustion as a major barrier to entry.
We also shouldn't take what we assume to be universal biological functions for granted. Roger Ekirch, a pioneer in the social history of sleep, gathered an enormous array of pre-industrial evidence regarding “biphasic sleep.” He showed that consolidated, uninterrupted eight-hour sleep is largely a function of industrialization and artificial lighting. Human behavior during the intervals between these two sleep phases was richly documented in diaries and memoirs. It shows how even our biology is historically and socially constructed.
This builds an interesting bridge to the reality in Ukraine right now. The structure of our night has changed drastically – not just due to curfews, but because of nighttime Russian air assaults. An attack on Kyiv, for instance, can last nine hours, meaning people get no sleep but must still show up for the workday. Most working-class and office employees don't have the luxury to structure their day or nap. A vast portion of the population is systematically sleep-deprived, yet there is no public conversation about restructuring the day to accommodate this reality.
That is a deeply moving and potent example. Restructuring a population's day is incredibly difficult because society requires an elaborate, synchronized rhythm – businesses, customers, transportation, and safety measures all have to align.
It reminds me of a digital visualization project by Stanford University that mapped the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. The curfew there was lifted for only an hour or two each day. By mapping the time it took to walk from a home to a bakery and back, the data visualization proved it was mathematically impossible for most residents to supply their households with food within the government-allotted time. Someone could map contemporary Kyiv in a similar way to show how local populations attempt to synchronize daily necessities with curfews, air raids, and shifting infrastructure realities. Historians often think in large eras, but we also need to look at finely grained, daily time.
In your book, The Politics of Nightfall, you look at how rest was institutionalized and weaponized within the frameworks of colonialism and the slave trade. How did you come up with this topic?
Tiring people out or depriving people of sleep and rest can be an intentional program of oppression. But sometimes it is unintentional. The effect is the same, nevertheless.
In 19th-century Brazil, there was a lot of ambivalence about slavery and about the question of rest. There were even manuals published about how to be a successful plantation owner, and how to treat the enslaved people who work there, how to get the most out of them. Plantation owners had to face the predicament that enslaved workers could run away, they could die, or they could become so exhausted that they couldn't work anymore. So the idea was to push them to the limit where they still could work, so the time for their rest was treated as a negative: that’s when they did not work. Consequently, in rural settings those who administered enslaved laborers usually accounted for where and when enslaved people could and couldn’t sleep and rest. On a plantation, there were separate buildings for them, but in the urban setting of Rio, they were sleeping wherever they could: in kitchens, barns, in the hallway, or at the bottom floor of the house.
One can imagine that the daily experiences of enslaved people are not easy to track. How do you find out about that? What are the sources of knowledge here?
That is the eternal methodological challenge. Enslaved people were largely prevented from leaving records of their own authorship. To reconstruct their lives, you have to read the available archives against the grain, combining different types of sources.
Travelogues of foreigners would be one of such sources. In 19th-century Brazil, the opening of ports attracted foreign merchants, scientists, and observers. Many were abolitionists who meticulously documented the daily rhythms, domestic layouts, and physical abuses of enslaved populations – details that locals found too mundane or unremarkable to write down.
Personally, I love working with police records. While sleeping and resting weren't illegal, daily police blotters are incredibly detailed. A night watchman's report might mention finding a runaway slave sleeping in a specific stable or alleyway. By reading through thousands of uncatalogued police records, you can piece together the micro-rhythms of urban space.
Another source would be post-mortem estate inventories that list a deceased person’s material property down to the smallest detail. If a blanket or a pillow was valuable enough to be explicitly willed to an heir, it signals its immense material and symbolic significance. These records also included domestic floor plans, showing us exactly where people were expected to sleep.
In a plantation setting, owners built slave quarters, but in an urban setting like Rio, enslaved people simply slept where they could – in kitchens, hallways, or stables. Rest was treated as a purely negative space: it was simply the residual time left over when as much work as possible had been extracted.
As the 19th century progressed, newspapers and advertisements also became useful. You start seeing ads for patent medicines, or early tonics containing cocaine, explicitly asking, "Are you tired? Do you need more energy?" You also find ads for cafes that joke about breaking the nighttime curfew, which tells us the law was actively being subverted by a rising nightlife culture.
Ultimately, writing about populations left out of traditional archives requires total transparency with your readers. You have to lay out the limits of your sources and confront the gaps in the archive, fulfilling an ethical responsibility to reconstruct these human stories without letting a heavy academic hand get in the way of the narrative.
