1 - Geographies

Summary

“Geographies” describes how hunger artists’ itinerancy became a key factor to explain their growing reputation and prestige in the period under study. It discusses how the geographical turn can be applied to the analysis of the tension between local and global events, to the spatial dimension of their practices, and to their professional status as itinerant travellers. The chapter describes Giovanni Succi’s trips to Africa, Europe, and America as a paradigm of the global dimension of a professional faster, and the way that colonial, commercial factors acted as preconditions for the later itinerant nature of the artist. The chapter also discusses the synchronic nature of the public fasts as described in the daily press on a global scale. Like natural catastrophes, wars and accidents, the long fasts were immediately reported to urban readers world-wide and contributed to the emergence of new global publics. In addition, the geographical dimension of hunger artists also includes the dynamism of medical networks and research schools that shared results and experiments on fasting and added new nodes to the global network. Similarly, impresarios of the show business accompanied hunger artists, and reinforced the itinerant nature of the metier.