With the climate crisis progressing dramatically, public health institutions and epidemiologists have been warning about the risk of unfamiliar vector-borne diseases such as yellow fever, West Nile virus, and dengue fever, chikungunya fever, Zika and more potentially spreading in Europe and other Regions in the Global North in the future. These diseases, generally categorized as ‘tropical diseases’, have long been associated with tropical regions of the Global South and discursively constructed as a discursive marker of difference between the Global North and Global South. Since vectors such as the Aedes albopictus, also known as the Asian Tiger Mosquito, are becoming more and more prevalent in Europe, these borders between are transgressed, destabilizing the concept of Western modernity which has been defined through the absence of tropical diseases in opposition to its imagined tropical ‘other’. This thesis deconstructs dominant representations of the mosquito as ‘invader’ or ‘villain’ and explores the narratives employed by German newspapers as they communicate the increasing prevalence of Aedes albopictus. The author finds that these narratives are based on colonial imaginaries of the ‘self’ which heavily rely on the construction of the ‘other’ in terms of disease, place and insect. These discourses are traced back to the origins of tropical medicine at the end of the 19th century which shows that the social imaginaries established by colonial medicine discourses have remained largely unchallenged.