Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses a microphotograph of a mosquito dissection to explores the influences and affective resonances of Soviet tropical medicine in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Paper long abstract:

To an entomologist it is a powerful image: a series of well-demarcated bumps along the oviduct indicate the mosquito's advanced age and by extension, her proficiency to transmit malaria. The clarity of the microphotograph also represents a considerable technical achievement: exposing the scarification within the ovary—the 'Detinova technique'—is a procedure few have been able to master. Tony Wilkes, an entomologist trained by the Tatjana S. Detinova during her tour of sub-Saharan Laboratories in 1962, was a notable exception. The image, taken by Tony in 1962, indexes a series of fragile relationships between vector biology and malaria eradication, between knowledge practices of the East and West, and between the art of seeing and the craft of making visible. This paper amplifies those resonances, not merely by contextualizing the image within socio-material practices of vector biology, but by reinterpreting its historicity alongside the traces that science in 'Tropics' leaves behind and the losses, pleasures, failures, and desires these leftovers relay.