Mapping the boundaries of race in the hungry earth/cold blood

Originally screening in 1970, serials featuring the people called “Silurians” have taken up issues of xenophobia and militarism among present-day and future humans. As a species awakened under Earth’s surface, the trajectory of human-Silurian encounters in these stories raises moral, social and political questions regarding the nature of contemporary (British) society and its readiness (or unreadiness) to relate with, make peace with, and share land with ‘outsiders’. This chapter examines how these issues are taken up in the 2010 serial The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood. Looking beyond the overt narrative, it interrogates how scientific and social-scientific knowledge subtly frames the terms of this encounter, structuring events in ways that perpetuate long-standing racial inequalities in our lived world, and largely occlude the more radical possibilities inherent in this situation. Nonetheless, this radical potential lies underground in this serial, challenging us to reconsider how our Earth is shared today.