"The Land Is Sung is a significant addition to a long tradition of critical writing about South African performance after apartheid. Focusing on one of the most marginalized regions of South Africa, Pooley adroitly complicates the concept of 'Zulu' music as a homogeneous body of sounds. Music, he argues, is inextricably intertwined with the heady debates about governance, justice, ethics, community, land ownership, and genealogy that have defined the north-eastern edges of the province of Kwazulu-Natal for centuries and that continue to both divide and unite its inhabitants."–Veit Erlmann, author of Lion's Share: Remaking South African Copyright
"In this rich and enlightening study, Thomas M. Pooley deftly probes the link between Zulu musical performance and a politics of place in South Africa. Sound, he suggests, can be seen as a means of occupation; to make sound is to declare a kind of territory–or 'sonic space'–one uniquely porous and unbounded. Music making thus seems specially accommodating to the political imagination. Indeed, in postcolonial contexts, amidst the continuing struggle to recover land and status lost, such performance takes on special historical salience, in South Africa and the world at large."–Jean Comaroff, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Harvard University
