French philosopher Jacques Derrida speaks to a Baker Hall auditorium audience Oct. 4, giving his lecture titled "My Independence of Algeria: A Little Negative Theology of the Mother Tongue." Adriana Rovers/University Photography
More than 150 visiting scholars converged on the Cornell campus this past weekend to join hundreds of other participants in exploring the complex political and cultural climate of post-colonial Algeria.
The three-day conference, titled "Algeria: In and Out of French," was organized by Cornell's Program in French Studies and included original films, music and some of the world's most prominent authorities on post-colonial North Africa.
One of the issues the conference sought to confront was Islamic fundamentalist terrorism that has plagued Algeria -- and, more recently, France -- since the French withdrew their military and civilian presence from Algeria after the country gained independence in 1962. This terrorism mainly targets individuals considered to be under Western influence: namely artists, intellectuals and women who, in their dress or behavior, violate religious tenets of Islam.
Another theme addressed during several of the weekend's events was the relationship between politics and language -- Algerians speak Algerian, Arabic, French and Berber, yet both the French government, until 1959, and the military regime that replaced it imposed interdictions on which languages could be used officially.
"I was pleased with the way the conference turned out; what I wanted to do was shake all the clichés about identity," said Anne Berger, professor of French literature who convened the three-day affair. "There was a mixture of scientific and theoretical dimensions and of ethical and human dimensions in the presentations. It was not strictly academic in that sense."
Nearly all of the participants invited to present their work spoke of having been personally affected by both political violence and by the politicized notions of linguistic identity in Algeria.
"The people I brought are the people who are still alive," noted Berger. "Many of their journalist and artist friends are dead."
Jacques Derrida, the noted deconstructionist philosopher, dedicated his Friday afternoon presentation to an Algerian colleague assassinated in 1995, "because of his convictions and intellectual relations," he said. Derrida's talk, for which nearly 400 people crammed into Baker Hall auditorium, dealt with the confused notion of a "mother tongue" in Algeria: "Does anyone speak a language that is maternal?" he asked. Derrida condemned the French colonial censorship of indigenous languages as "the hegemony of the homogeneous -- which flattens the text."
On Thursday afternoon, Jean-Pierre Lledo, an Algerian-born filmmaker, presented two of his latest documentaries at Cornell Cinema. The first, Chroniques algeriénnes, featured interviews with the families of assassinated artists in Algeria.
"I had an obligation to make this film," Lledo said in his introductory speech. "I wanted to show those who live daily and resist daily [the Islamic moral code]," he told the audience, speaking in French, with a translator. Lledo has been in exile from Algeria for the past three years, after having been "directly threatened" by fundamentalists because of his previous films, he said.
Other popular events included presentations by professors from universities in France, Algeria and the United States and a concert by Algerian singer Ferhat, who played Kabylian songs to a festive crowd in Barnes Hall on Saturday night.