In the first two decades of the 21st century, debates comparing the history of South Africa to Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians have intensified. Simultaneously, the ways authors in both locales engage with the violence and injustice of their surroundings has changed. Instead of producing stories about direct perpetration, authors increasingly focus on the nebulous daily experience of complicity: indirect involvement in wrongdoing produced vis-a-vis membership in a social body.To consolidate these literary shifts, I propose that authors working in the last twenty years in South Africa and Israel/Palestine produce complicity literature. I argue that complicity literature is characterized by the following: environments that bear races of violence that the texts don’t directly address, the ethical insufficiency of the first-person “I” as a reliable producer of knowledge or truth, and finally, the projection of epistemological and ethical uncertainty in first-person narratives on to readers. Drawing on scholarship from both the South African and Hebrew corpora, this dissertation trains the sensitive lens of affect studies to augment post/decolonial theory and responsibility theory. “Barbecue, Coffee, and the Wave of History: Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative” argues that a negotiation of claims of indigeneity on the one hand, and ties to European whiteness and a global middle-class on the other, animate white South African identity. “Cemeteries, Factories, and Forests: Unsettled Settlers in Picnic Grounds and An Almost Olympic Size Pool” analyzes the triangulated unsettlement of space, affect, and genre in Israeli authors Oz Shelach and Roni Brodetzky’s writing. “Checkpoints, Bedrooms, and Boomerangs: Choc en Retour in Shani Boianjiu’s The People of Forever are Not Afraid” draws on Aimé Césaire’s work to show how violence enacted towards the other determines which emotional responses are available for the self and who or what might be an object of those emotions. Finally, “Tunnels, Animals, and Lost Things: The Lacuna of Collective Responsibility in Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City” establishes public culpability and complicity as unaddressed lacunae in both law and philosophy. Taken together, the chapters show that Jewish-Israelis’ and white South Africans’ complicity circumscribes their sensory and intellectual perception. The project thus opens new possibilities for addressing the resonance of colonial violence in our time.