GHOSTLINESS AND POLITICS OF INTEGRATION IN STEVE CARTER’S HOUSE OF SHADOWS

Abstract

The politics of integration launched by civil rights movement in the 1960s has a few decades later failed, because recent surveys show that re-segregation is con­siderably increasing in America. This arouses myriad controversial questions ad­dressed by two opposing views. On the one hand, the radical anti-integrationist critics, and, on the other hand, the neo-integrationist activists. For the latter, racial integration remains a key vector to eradicating segregation. Therefore, it sought to redefine the term ‘integration’ which is still polysemous. The objective of this arti­cle is to propose a new definition, by showing, in light of psychoanalytic theory, the slavery entailments in the failure of the existing American integration process. This article posits that an exhaustive definition of ‘integration’ should take into account the impacts of slavery as depicted in Steve Carter’s House of Shadows.