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"Cairo Chairs: Notes from the Cairo Sidewalk Salons"
The Funambulist, ed. Leopold Lambert, Paris, France, 2016
Cairo’s battered street chairs form the city’s largest open-air museum, where monobloc plastic rubs elbows with Rococo wood and every seat doubles as kiosk lounge, doorman’s watchtower, or political outpost. Tracking these humble thrones from nineteenth-century coffeehouses to the 2011 uprising and today’s sanitized “new capital,” the essay shows how informal furniture mediates work, gender, surveillance, and dissent—each chair acting as both comma and barricade in Egypt’s megacity. This text is a condensed, standalone version of a longer essay that appears in my book Sidewalk Salon: 1001 Street Chairs of Cairo, co-authored with David Puig. (Onomatopee / Kotob Khan, 2015).
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Criticism & Academic Writing