Dialogue: Writing Back Against Empire

Devin George Atallah is a Palestinian from the shataat/diaspora currently living and working in Boston on the lands of the Wampanoag, Massachusett, Nipmuc, and other Indigenous peoples of the Northeast of Turtle Island (in the nation-state of USA) with his beloved children and community.  Atallah’s Indigenous roots return to the mountains, trees, and kinships of the village of Beit-Jala in occupied Palestine. Atallah is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is a researcher, scholar, activist, and healer dedicated to transnational decolonial movements, and Palestinian liberation. Atallah’s work focuses on decolonial psychology, and builds off his extensive community and clinical psychology experience. He strives towards contributing to understandings of decolonial resistance in Palestine while drawing linkages to movements and critical knowledges of Black and Indigenous communities transnationally, studying intergenerational trauma, grief, and revolutionary healing in the face of settler colonial violence and genocide. Atallah is author of the recent publications, “CURCUM’s Trees: A Decolonial Healing Guide for Palestinian Community Health Workers” available online with MayFly Books, which Atallah co-authored with colleagues in Palestine and the shataat; and “A World Without Palestinians” which he co-authored and is published in Mass Review; and “Beyond Grief: Decolonial Love for Palestinian Life” published in the Journal of Palestine Studies.