Sleep, and the lack of it, is a public obsession and an enormous everyday quandary. Troubled sleep tends to be seen as an individual problem and personal responsibility, to be fixed by better habits and tracking gadgets, but the reality is more complicated. Sleep is a site of politics, culture, and power.
In Restless in Sleep Country Paul Huebener pulls back the covers on cultural representations of sleep to show how they are entangled with issues of colonialism, homelessness, consumer culture, technology and privacy, the exploitation of labour, and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Even though it almost entirely evades direct experience, sleep is the subject of a variety of potent narratives, each of which can serve to clarify and shape its role in our lives. In Canada, cultural visions of slumber circulate through such diverse forms as mattress commercials, billboards, comic books, memoirs, experimental poetry, and bedtime story phone apps. By guiding us through this imaginative landscape, Huebener shows us how to develop a critical literacy of sleep.
Lying down and closing our eyes is an act that carries surprisingly high stakes, going beyond individual sleep troubles. Restless in Sleep Country illuminates the idea of sleep as a crucial site of inequity, struggle, and gratification.
Authors
- Published in
- Montreal, CA
Table of Contents
- Cover 1
- RESTLESS IN SLEEP COUNTRY 2
- Title 4
- Copyright 5
- Dedication 6
- CONTENTS 8
- Figures 10
- Acknowledgments 12
- Introduction Reading Sleep in a Restless World 18
- 1 Welcome to Sleep Country 36
- 2 The Poetics of Sleep 68
- 3 Fictions of Sleep 96
- Interlude Sleeping through Covid-19 123
- 4 Entering Sleep Mode 133
- 5 Sleeping in the Anthropocene 168
- Conclusion The Work of Sleep 197
- Appendix: Your Sleep Assignment 202
- Notes 206
- Bibliography 226
- Index 248