THE LAND IS SUNG, Zulu performances and the politics of place

268pp., illus., maps, paperback, First SA Edition, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2025

ISBN: 9781869145927

First published in 2023 in the USA.

Musicologist Thomas M. Pooley demonstrates how performances of song, dance, and praise poetry connect Zulu communities to their ancestral homes and genealogies. The dynamics of governance and tradition are explored in studies of rural and migrant communities in the midlands and borderlands of South Africa, and in Johannesburg's inner city. Pooley theorises the politics of performance through a series of critical interventions in postcolonial debates on justice and environmental ethics, education and indigenous knowledge systems, musical and linguistic analysis, and the ethics of recording practice.

"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

Thomas M. Pooley  is Associate Professor of Musicology and Chair of the Department of Art and Music at the University of South Africa. He is the editor-in-chief of Muziki: Journal of Music Research in Africa.