the Separatism seminar: the about-face — from anti-Canadian to anti-O.N.A.N. overnight

The seminar's governing puzzle, and the theme's central political mystery: every Québécois separatist faction "dropped the original Québec-independence objective like a rock and switched seemingly overnight" to "agitating against O.N.A.N. and the Reconfiguration and forcing the return of the Concavity to our map." Decades of anti-Ottawa nationalism reversed the instant Interdependence was declared, the cells now "insurg[ing] against O.N.A.N. on behalf of the same Canada they'd spent decades treating like the enemy." The oddness of the switch is what the rest of the call tries to solve — and its solution (the meta-extortion theory) is the anthology's deepest reading of the insurgency. ("forcing the return of the Concavity to our map" is the map-rhetoric maps-territory keeps at p.1012; landed here is the political about-face.)