Small Change: Realism, Immanence, and the Politics of the Micro

In recent debates about reading methods, in the field of microsociology, and in the history of the novel, small-scale observations of everyday life tend to be understood as conservative, reinforcing the status quo. Through a reading of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) in relation to documentary lyric and the online genre of microaggressions, this essay argues for the political utility of description at the micro scale.