He is the author of Development Arrested: Race, Power, and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta and the coeditor of Black geographies and the Politics of Place with Katherine McKittrick. He recently edited the American Quarterly special issue In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions (September 2009) and has completed a manuscript on New Orleans. He is also working on a study of the evolution of the African American community in Southern California, from 1781 to the present.