Article summary, in lieu of abstract
In this article I read Jane Bryce’s memoir Zamani through the analytic of the “effluent eye,” a method drawn from Rosemary Jolly that centers what escapes the sovereign state’s desire for order, legibility, and containment. Bringing this lens into dialogue with Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics and Mahmood Mamdani’s critique of ethnic nationalism, the essay argues that Zamani exposes the fractures and insecurities within colonial and postcolonial visual regimes. Bryce’s nonlinear, affective recollections, shaped through maps, photographs, walking, and relationships, reveal memory as excess: porous, and resistant to archival discipline.
Figures such as Martha and Mr. Thomas embody forms of agency grounded in opacity, silence, and embodied knowledge rather than state-recognized visibility. Their refusals disrupt the narrator’s inherited colonial frameworks and exemplify effluence’s resistance to containment. Walking functions as a counter-mapping practice that unsettles colonial infrastructures and foregrounds lived, relational geographies occluded by imperial visuality. Mobilizing Anne Stoler’s conception of ruination, the article shows how colonial debris persists across temporalities, shaping Bryce’s attempts to reconcile past and present. Ultimately, Zamani becomes a site where excess, memory, and migrancy articulate alternative modes of knowing and belonging beyond the sovereign frame.
Sam Dennis 