He has edited numerous collections on such topics as Islam and African literature, African cinema, and women in African literature and cinema, including: with Frieda Ekotto the collection Rethinking African Cultural Production (Indiana University Press, 2015). Edited African Filmmaking: Five Formations (MSU Press, 2017), A Companion in African Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), coedited with Carmela Garritano.

He has published more than 60 articles and twenty-five chapters.

His service to the profession includes organizing numerous conferences dealing with African literature and cinema, including twice the African Literature Association's annual conference-once on the theme of theory in the field of African literary studies in 1986, and a second in 1997 on African cinema.

He served as President of the African Literature Association, and was honored with their first Distinguished Member Award in 2009. In 2010 he was honored with the Distinguished Faculty Award at Michigan State University, and in 2011 was honored with the Distinguished Africanist Award at the Toyin Falola Annual Conference, University of Texas. In 2023 he was awarded the Distinguished Africanist Award, African Studies Association.

Grants include an NEH Younger Humanist Award recipient in 1973-4, which brought him to France, Algeria, and Morocco. His Fulbright teaching and research awards brought him to Cameroon in 1977-79, and Senegal from 1982-3 and 2005-6.

He has served on the board for the African Literature Association, the African Studies Association.

He is general editor for the series "African Humanities and the Arts" for Michigan State University Press.

He was recently focusing his work on time and space in African cinema, and African cinema's relationship to the contested concept of World Cinema.

Publications :

2023 - African Cinema in a Global Age
2022 - Space and Time in African Cinema and Cine-Scapes
2013 - Trash: African Cinema from Below
2007 - Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism
2001 - Less Than One and Double (Studies in African Literature)
1996 - The Marabout & the Muse (Studies in African Literature)
1993 - Thresholds of Change in African Literature
1991 - Faces of Islam in African Literature (Studies in African Literature New Series)