Li, Yuanyuan

This chapter proposes group emotions as a promising field to bring the two views together. More specifically, it focuses on the emotion of envy and its relationship with complicity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth. This chapter argues that envy has the potential to instigate common people’s complicity in injustice. However, when considered as a group-based emotion, envy serves as an analytical tool to reflect on the social structures that perpetuate complicity. It begins with an overview of Sara Protasi’s theory of envy and the concept of group-based emotions. It then analyses the role of envy in Beloved, in which the ex-slaves are complicit with slavery due to their spiteful envy, and suggests that emulative envy might offer a more desirable form of affect. However, in The White Earth, emulative envy also drives the descendants of settlers to imitate the Indigenous people, which contributes to the continuation of settler colonialism. Although the novel ends with the protagonist’s failure to resist complicity, it also implies a potential solution, that is, to move from an equated competition to a differentiated solidarity.