Intersectional Geographies: A Geo-Critical Exploration of Cairo in Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (2007)

Abstract

Lucette Lagnado’s "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit" (2007) serves as a poignant exploration of identity and displacement through an interwoven lens of geocriticism and intersectionality. This paper interrogates the geographies of belonging and estrangement in Lagnado’s memoir, examining how Cairo’s stratified spatialities are simultaneously constructed, inhabited, and remembered by the Lagnado family, whose identities are shaped by the intersecting vectors of ethnicity, religion, gender, and class. Drawing on Bertrand Westphal’s geocritical paradigm, the study investigates how Jewish Cairo—with its synagogues, domestic interiors, and urban thresholds—emerges as a palimpsestic site where these overlapping identities are negotiated and contested. The analysis underscores how Lagnado’s positionality as a Jewish woman within a patriarchal, postcolonial, and politically volatile Cairo informs her perception of space, transforming it into a multilayered topography of exclusion, nostalgia, and fragile belonging. Simultaneously, the paper demonstrates how the narrative’s focalization resonates with the profound socio-political transformations of mid-twentieth-century Egypt, as nationalist aspirations reshaped the city’s intricate mosaic of communities. By foregrounding Crenshaw’s notion of intersectionality within a geocritical reading of urban space, this study illuminates the dynamic interplay between embodied identity and spatial imagination in diasporic life-writing, offering a nuanced theoretical contribution to the spatial humanities through its synthesis of affect, memory, and geography.