Wilhelm Joest, Early German Ethnography and Contemporary Approaches to Writing the Life of an Imperial Actor: An Interview with Wilhelm Joest’s Biographer Anne Haeming

ABSTRACT This interview explores the ethical implications of writing the biography of Wilhelm Joest, a nineteenth-century German ethnographer, traveller and collector whose work was deeply embedded in colonial networks of dependency. Through her research and biography of Joest, Haeming critically examines his entanglement with imperial knowledge production, the exploitation of colonised peoples and the epistemic violence of ethnographic collecting. Reflecting on dependency studies and life writing from a twenty-first-century perspective, this conversation highlights how biographical storytelling can both illuminate and interrogate historical structures of asymmetrical dependency. The interview discusses the material and archival challenges of reconstructing Joest’s life and addresses Joest’s position within transnational economies of enslavement, particularly in relation to the sugar trade and European scientific networks, revealing how systems of forced labour underpinned knowledge production in imperial contexts. Through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates museum studies, provenance research and postcolonial critique, Haeming offers new insights into the methodological possibilities of biography as a tool for critically engaging with histories of dependency and coercion. This interview contributes to the special issue’s project of critically examining the relationship between life writing and dependency, demonstrating how individual narratives can serve as sites of both historical critique and ethical reflection.