WARM BROAD GLOW
GLENN LIGON, 2005
Read it. You already did. You couldn’t not. This is Warm Broad Glow. Glenn Ligon. 2005. Neon on the wall. So here’s the thing. That phrase isn’t random. It comes from Gertrude Stein — a novel called Three Lives, 1909. She’s describing a Black character named Rose and she writes about “the warm broad glow of negro sunshine.” And right away you feel the problem with it. Stein is working in stereotype — Black people as always happy, always glowing, always joyful. A reduction. But then Ligon noticed something inside the phrase. “Negro” — the way that word was coded — meant darkness. Absence of light. And sunshine is the presence of all light. So Stein has put two completely contradictory things right next to each other. And Ligon looks at that and goes: okay. I’m going to make it literal. He makes the phrase glow. And look at the title. Warm Broad Glow. That’s lifted straight out of Stein’s sentence. So what the language described, the neon is now actually doing. It’s not a comment on the phrase. It is the phrase. Completed. Look at the cords too. Visible. Nothing hidden. The power source is right there. This light isn’t pretending to come from nowhere. Ligon said it himself — in a country that is for the most part anti-Black, any expression of Black joy is a kind of resistance. So this phrase — taken from a white writer, sitting inside a stereotype, containing its own light — gets rewired until it fills the room.