With an Effluent Eye: Migrancy, Excess, and Belonging in Jane Bryce’s Zamani

Abstract

This article examines Jane Bryce’s Zamani (2023) through the conceptual lens of the effluent eye, drawing on Rosemary Jolly’s (2023) theorization of effluence alongside Achille Mbembe’s (2019) necropolitics and Mahmood Mamdani’s (2020) critique of ethnic nationalism. I argue that Zamani unsettles the sovereign state’s desire for legibility and containment by foregrounding memory, migration, and excess as resistant and effluent forces. Through close readings of narrative structures, maps, photographs, and embodied practices such as walking, I show how Bryce’s memoir foregrounds relational, affective, and alternative epistemologies that exceed colonial and postcolonial frameworks of knowing. The effluent framework reveals the insecurities and fractures embedded within regimes of power, exposing how the past, present, and future remain inextricably entangled. Characters like Martha and Mr. Thomas illustrate how agency is asserted through opacity, refusal, and embodied memory rather than through state-recognized forms of visibility.