“Performances” describes some of the most famous fasting practices, places and institutions that welcomed hunger artists, from sealed cages to open-air shows, from Succi’s impressive public fasting at the freak atmosphere of the Royal Aquarium London to his parade across Brooklyn bridge in New York in 1890. Based on Kafka’s Hungerkunstler, to reflect on the influence of the audience in the success or failure of fasting performances, the chapter describes a general typology of performances of public fasting and their implications in the epistemology of the art. It depicts hunger artists’ fencing, riding, climbing, ballooning, in specific urban contexts and their influence on contemporary knowledge on fasting, inanition and starvation. The chapter also analyses how the varied audiences appropriated hunger artists, and created a commotion, in which different and opposing interpretations of the facts coexisted in the public sphere, for example, concerning the risk of exceeding thirty days of fasting, and the ideal method to tackle fraud and provide ‘objectivity’. It also points out the controversial views on the scientific value of public fasting performances in medical journals and in the daily press.

“Politics”, describes how hunger artists became a trending issue for the morality and politics of industrial societies of the late nineteenth century. Their controversial performances challenged hygiene policies, issues of individual and social discipline, and added new factors to be considered by social reformers. Since hunger artists entered the popular culture of their time, their ‘heroic’ stories contributed towards the debate on the possibility of human beings living with less food, so the social conditions of wellbeing and health, especially for the working class, could be revisited. Public fasting became a sort of physical prowess, a metaphor of self-discipline, a commodity to be bought and sold in the logic of the industrial capitalist society, at the same time, opening the door to a more popular, eclectic medicine that challenged academic authority and established power. Equally, despite the global nature of the land of the hunger artists, these popular, controversial performances became a tool of national pride or national humiliation. Hunger artists played a role in standardisation processes of the calories required to properly feed the citizens of the nation. They evoked the health, resilience, and discipline of the average citizen as a key agent in the making of the modern nation, as a future, collective project.

The “Conclusion” presents the potential benefits of human fasting experiments and performances to ‘advance’ medical knowledge, as described by Dr Gunn, a member of the supervisory board of Dr Henry Tanner’s fast in New York in 1880, and one of his biographers. It is through the historical analysis of these ‘benefits’ that this final chapter discusses the actual epistemological value and historical agency of hunger artists, and summarizes the main analytical frameworks of the book. This final chapter also recapitulates the main landmarks of the rich ‘topography’ of the land of the hunger artists, from the long list of cities in which public fasts took place, to the variety of ‘citizens’ of the land who circulated across its vast territory and the places and material objects that brought doctors, fasters, impresarios, and global publics together. At the end of the conclusion, I have added a short discussion about the reasons for the hunger artists’ decline in the 1920s, in an endeavour to place Kafka’s pessimistic view of the metier in a proper context.

“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.

“Spirits” discusses the limitation of strict materialist explanations of the processes of inanition, and how hunger artists fit in alternative vitalist, naturist, eclectic, spiritualist approaches, which at the time had numerous defenders. Succi’s case, being the editor of the spiritist journal Il Correo Spiritico is a paradigmatic example of this trend. In that context of heterodoxy, hunger artists contributed towards opening the door to a psychological turn, to the progressive emergence of psychological explanations of voluntary hunger and resistance to inanition as a new field of scientific inquiry, often with a gender bias. The psychological turn gave new prominence to names such as Charles Richet and Hippolyte Bernheim, but it also had its roots in Luigi Luciani’s non-strictly materialist explanation of Succi’s resistance to inanition in Florence in 1888. The chapter brings to the fore the names of several women fasters, often treated as patients and pathologized as “fasting girls”, but in other cases appearing in the public sphere like other male professional fasters and following analogous performances. In that gendered psychological turn, terms such as willpower, inner force, hypnosis, and insanity progressively gained influence in explanations on the causes of resistance to prolonged fasting.