With an Effluent Eye: Migrancy, Excess, and Belonging in Jane Bryce’s Zamani Sam Dennis Otieno Comparative Literature and African Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, USA, 442 Burrowes Building, University Park, PA 16802 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. By weaving together theories of excess, visuality, and ruination, this article contends that effluence is not simply what escapes sovereign violence but what affirms alternative modes of knowing and belonging. Ultimately, Zamani becomes a site where colonial debris and relational futures are negotiated through affect, movement, and the persistence of memory across shifting historical tenses. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 30 April 2025 Accepted 30 July 2025 KEYWORDS effluence; excess; memory; colonial-capitalism; nation- state; East Africa Introduction This article examines Zamani (2023), Jane Bryce’s 1 memoir of postcolonial Tanzania, to explore how memory, migration, and colonial legacies unsettle the sovereign state’s desire for order and legibility. The title Zamani, a Kiswahili word referring to a past that undergirds the present (sasa), invites a reading attuned not only to personal recollection but also to the collective and precolonial temporalities. While Bryce narrates her own experiences of growing up in postcolonial Tanzania, her engagement with memory often gestures beyond the autobiographical registering shared histories and relational traces embedded in place and myth. Drawing on Rosemary Jolly’s (2023) concept of the effluent eye, I approach the memoir through a methodological lens attuned to what Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies is co-published by NISC Pty (Ltd) and Informa Limited (trading as Taylor & Francis Group) CONTACT Sam Dennis Otieno samdennis961@gmail.com © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group EASTERN AFRICAN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES https://doi.org/10.1080/23277408.2025.2542982