| Joseph Conrad was one of the most famous English novelists at the turn of the 19th century. He was the son of a Polish patriot and was born at a time when Poland was partitioned by great western powers. He was exiled, together with his parents, to the northern part of Russia when he was quite young. His frustrated life experience and his identity both as one of the members of a devastated nation and an intellectual of the first world influenced his entire writing career.Said remarks in his Orientalism that "Every European, in what lie could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist and almost totally ethnocentric"; that every literary text, to some degree, is burdened with the load of its environment, the load of empirical reality of producing it; and that the author is a person who describes and at the same time reflects his environment. Conrad lived in a time when imperialism was in its heyday and imperialists ran amuck all over the world. As an artist, he did not live in an isolated world. The marks of his time were deeply branded on him and then reflected in his works. The ideology of the whole era pervaded in his works.M. Foulcault's theory of power discourses helpful to our understanding Conrad's novel. Foulcault believes that knowledge is inextricably connected to power, such that they are written as power / knowledge. Power is exercised within discourses in the ways in which they constitute and govern individual subjects. Every individual is placed under surveillance of this power/knowledge for what he does, writes, thinks, and etc.Conrad's knowledge of this world shaped his way of thinking and writing, constituted the patterns of his own discourse. The conflict between racist and anti-imperialist ideology in Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a good example of this surveillance. And conversely, this theory offers us a powerful theoretical ground to study this phenomenon in this fiction.The publication of this novel offered, for the first time, a chance for the Europeans to glimpse the scramble for Africa and the devastation of the Africans by their ancestors. It was full of humanitarian and anti-imperialist sentiments in it while pervasive in the novella were a sense of white superiority and a sense of indifference toward and racial discrimination against other races. It makes the reader feel that Conrad was trying to defend and doing his part to retrieve empire-building from ruins while lashing and censured it relentlessly.In the light ofthe theories of the post-colonialist theorists like Said's "culture and imperialism", Faucault's "power discourse", Gramsci's "consent", this thesis investigates into and analyzes how we come to realize the juxtaposition of racism and anti-imperialism.The Introduction presents a brief survey of foreign and domestic differences on this topic and justifies my reading from a mixed perspective of racism and anti-imperialism.Chapter One is devoted, from the narratological view regarding voice to the examination of two conflicting voices by Marlow, the mouthpiece of Conrad.Chapter Two analyzes the characterization and the use of white and black to demonstrate the mingled perspectives, withemphasis on the major character Kurtz, who is the embodiment of imperial ideal as well as a renegade self-reproaches the inhuman conduct of empire-building. Kurtz's African mistress and his European intended are also analyzed, with the finding that complicated feelings of racism and anti-imperialism are embedded in the depiction of the two women. The ambivalent use of black and white , dark and light are carefully explored.Chapter Three attempts to show Conrad's complex of racial discrimination and imperialism. It begins with analysis of the images of Africa and Africans, claiming that these images are not Conrad's own invention, but a recycling of a stereotyped reinvention of the western imagination of the "other". They are not only racist, but also apocalyptic in warning the practitioners of imperialism that empire-building will be ruined if...
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