Ten artists and intellectuals with personal and professional ties to Algeria will visit Cornell University next week for a conference on the political and cultural issues facing this violence-racked nation in northern Africa.

"Algeria: In and Out of French" will run Thursday, Oct. 3, through Saturday, Oct. 5. Free and open to the public, it is being organized by Cornell's Program in French Studies and will address such topics as the complex relations between politics and language (Algerians speak Algerian, Arabic, French and Berber) and the sexual politics of Algeria, where divorced, working and non-veiled women and even young girls have been killed by fundamentalist factions.

"Algeria is the site of a double terrorism," said conference convener Anne Berger, associate professor of French in Cornell's Department of Romance Studies: "the terrorism of the so-called Islamic fundamentalists -- whose first targets are women of all classes, artists, journalists and intellectuals, especially the Francophone and Berberophone ones -- and the terrorism of a corrupt military regime. Meanwhile, France, which has had a surge of Algerian refugees, has been forced into the scene through repeated bomb attacks by armed fundamentalist groups; the GIA, or Islamic Armed Group, has vowed to kill all the artists and intellectuals who have taken refuge in France.

"It seemed to me that what was going on there deserved to be reported and debated here at Cornell," Berger continued. "Every day in Algeria, people of the word -- intellectuals, journalists, writers, academics, playwrights, actors -- are murdered, and I think of this conference as an homage and tribute to them."

On a broader scale, she said, the Algerian crisis offers a compelling case study of the internal and external struggles of former colonies and the conflicts arising from multiculturalism and multilingualism. "Algeria is one of the most complicated sites of enunciation of French in the world today," she said. "Contemporary Algeria provides us with an instance of a most conflicted use of this language, as well as of its other founding languages -- one which should force us to think in no easy ways of the relations between language, culture and history in post-colonial contexts, relations whose understanding and formulation have direct political implications as they shape the very concept of 'nation' and national identities."

The conference is the first at Cornell to focus on post-colonial Algeria, she noted.

A highlight of the conference will be a free concert by Ferhat, the famous Berber singer-songwriter, at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 5, in Barnes Hall. A co-founder of the Movement for Culture and Democracy in Algeria, Ferhat holds a Ph.D. in political science and currently is writing his autobiography at his home in France.

In addition, on Thursday, Oct. 3, from 4:30 to 7 p.m., Cornell Cinema will present screenings of two films in Willard Straight Theatre with discussions by the Franco-Algerian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Lledo. The films, Chroniques algŽriennes (1993) and L'Oasis de la Belle de Mai (1996), are in French but may be accompanied by informal English translation.

Thursday and Friday afternoons will feature lectures in the Guerlac Room of the A.D. White House -- some in English, others in French with English translation -- by Ferhat and anthropologists BŽnamar MŽdiene and Tassadit Yacine. Friday evening will feature addresses in Baker Hall Room 200 by HŽlne Cixous, a writer and professor of literature, and Jacques Derrida, one of the most famous philosophers living in Europe, according to Berger.

Saturday morning, historian Lucette Valensi, Francophone literature professor Hafid Gafaiti and writer Rachid Boudjedra will discuss the interrelationship of literature, language and power in Algeria in Goldwin Smith Hall Amphitheater D; that afternoon, a roundtable discussion in the same location will include all conference speakers, with informal translations in French and English.

The conference is being cosponsored by the Dean's Office of the College of Arts and Sciences, Society for the Humanities, Council for the Arts, Rose Goldsen Fund and several other departments and organizations. For more information call Anne Berger at (607) 255-1380 or e-mail her at .

Other fall events the Program in French Studies has helped to organize include:

• Oct. 22, "Two Stories in One: Literature as a Hidden Door to Seventeenth-Century French History," annual Einaudi lecture by Christian Jouhaud, director of research at the Centre de Recherches Historiques in Paris, and the Luigi Einaudi Chair in Modern European and International Studies at Cornell; 4:30 p.m., A.D. White House;
• Nov. 8-9, "Entering Politics From Below and From Above: the Legitimizing Process, 16th through 18th Centuries," a conference convened by Jouhaud and history Professor Steven Kaplan;
• Nov. 12, "Quebec: The Last Referendum and Prospects for the Next," a lecture by Robert Young of the University of Western Ontario, 4:30 p.m., Uris Hall Room G-08; and
• Dec. 2, "Planning and Politics: Paris in the 21st Century," a lecture by Christian Poncet, deputy chief of staff for the mayor of Paris, 4:30 p.m., A.D. White House.