“I WANT TO BE NOTHING”. CHALLENGING NOTIONS OF CULTURE, RACE AND IDENTITY

This article tackles the issue of “hyphenated identities” in Heidi W. Durrow’s novel The girl who fell from the sky (2010), whose main topic is growing up as a girl of mixed race in a dominant black culture. This article examines how Rachel Morse, the main character in the novel, challenges racism and the essentialist notion of identity. Firstly, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy’s approaches to that issue are introduced and discussed. Then in relation to their theories an interpretation of Durrow’s