The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s profoundly marked culture in the United States. It changed how basic notions of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, politics, and art were (and are) understood. However, one of the most important literary legacies of the Movement is the continuing productivity of key Black Arts writers, such as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Haki Madhubuti, and Askia Toure. Toure's Dawnsong!, a particularly ambitious example of that productivity, seeks to create a new sort of African American epic, fusing Black Arts mythmaking with a radical post-Black Arts historicism.