Djarah Kan is a Ghanaian-Italian writer, feminist, blogger, and cultural and social media activist and artist. She is one of the most lucid and cutting voices in Italy investigating the workings of sexist, racist, and classist systems of domination and their articulations. Born in 1993, she grew up in a reception center for refugees in Castelvolturno, some 40 kilometers north-west of Naples. As a child, she observed the world of associations and NGOs, and all the power struggles between those who help and those who are helped, between whites and non-whites.

In 2019, she published a short story in the anthology Future. In 2020, she published her first book, Thieves of Teeth, a collection of short stories focusing on a miscellany of fictional, personal, and critical texts on structural racism and sexism, the persistence of colonial stereotypes in the Italian collective imaginary, and the need to deploy an intersectional perspective and to fight discriminations. 

She has published widely, in Gli Asini, Magazine Rosa Luxemburg, Jacobin Italia, L’Espresso, L’Essenziale, and La Repubblica. With others, she launched the Facebook live-stream series “Non me nero accorta” (I didn’t notice – a play on the expression “Non me n’ero accorta”, meaning “I didn’t notice”, but with “n’ero” written “nero”, which means Black), in which the authors converse about racism, intersectionality, Black subjectivities, culture, and literature. 

Djarah Kan is one of the most interesting intellectuals in the contemporary Italian cultural landscape when it comes to issues of structural discrimination. She brought such issues to the stage of the Internazionale Festival in Ferrara in 2020 and the Più Libri Più Liberi publishing fair in Rome in 2021. She is one of the leading young intellectuals who took the floor to speak about the workings of inequality in Italy as governed by a neo-fascist party.