Dr. Ajitpaul Mangat, assistant professor of English at Niagara University, published the article "Pitchfork, Race, Collaboration, and the Making of 'Indie Rap'" in the Journal of Popular Music Studies.

In his essay, Dr. Mangat historicizes the moment in popular music when rap music and indie rock began conversing with one another and how Pitchfork received what is referred to as "indie rap" by drawing a particular line of influence from indie rock to rap music, thereby showing that it contributed to the historical whitening of Black music. He argues that Pitchfork constructed a series of binary oppositions that associated Black rap music with pastness and the commercial and "white" indie rock with futurity and the experimental, and counters this antagonistic racialization by reconstructing a lineage of Black radical aesthetics that includes the experimental vocal manipulations of artists ranging from Stevie Wonder to Kanye West.

"This essay seeks to recover the collaborative spirit that defined 'indie rap' by showing how indie rockers and rappers labored together to produce an 'indie rap' that crossed the musical and racial lines established by Pitchfork," he said.

Dr. Mangat earned his B.A. at the University of Manitoba, his M.A. at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville, and his Ph.D. at the University at Buffalo. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of disability and race in contemporary American literature and art. Dr. Mangat is currently at work on his first book, entitled "Forms of Affiliation: Disability Life Writing and the Socialization of Care," which considers how disability life writing imagines the socialization of care through the formalization of networked affiliations that counter the neoliberal privatization of care within the enclosure of the family. He is also currently co-editing (with Christina Fogarasi) a special issue of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies that will offer a critical reassessment of David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder's foundational concept of "narrative prosthesis" after 25 years. His scholarship appears or is forthcoming in the edited collections Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction, Neurodiversity on Television and Care and Disability, as well as the Journal of Popular Music Studies.