This essay theorizes ‘sleeping in the wake' as a counterintuitive yet vital Black feminist aesthetic tradition that centers nonconsciousness – somnolence, hypersomnia, and blackouts – as a strategy of political refusal in slavery's afterlife. Grounded in the legacy of Harriet Tubman, whose traumatic brain injury and subsequent sleep affliction are celebrated by contemporary Black feminists as a vital component of her political activism, this essay shows how Black sleep torques the racialized, ableist, and gendered parameters of ‘lived experience'. By examining Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely , Tricia Hersey's Rest Is Resistance , and contemporary art installations, this essay traces how contemporary Black feminist thinkers and artists revalue the horizontal body. I map two distinct but twinning lineages across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: one that reclaims rest as a collective, spiritual practice of repair and reparations and another that embraces nonconsciousness as a necessary relief valve from the reproductive labor of interiority and selfhood. Ultimately, ‘sleeping in the wake’ decouples sociopolitical awareness from physical wakefulness, expanding the boundaries of feminist phenomenology by framing deadened, diminished, or suspended mental states as radical, opaque sites of Black aliveness.
Erica Fretwell (Mon,) studied this question.