This thesis examines the colonial-era postcard in Egypt as a popular cultural artifact, through specific examples of portraiture claiming to represent Egyptian womanhood. In this thesis, I collect fourteen postcards, featuring various images with Egyptian women subjects, and I analyse these images-as-artifacts in relation to colonial cultural mythologies, through the identification of several recurring motifs, most notably the instrumentalization of nudity and veiling. Arab, African, and Black feminist frameworks are foundational to my methodology and theoretical approach, most notably Amira Jarmakani’s aesthetic critique in Imagining Arab Womanhood (2008) and Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation framework from “Venus in Two Acts” (2008). I analyse how the postcards are aesthetically staged, as well as how the subjects are identified and characterized. In my study, I focus on the audience decoding of images, and how it is primarily through the audience interaction with the colonial postcard that violence is projected onto the object. I explore initial audience interaction through the material examples of text on the postcards, to contemporary circulations such as in Egyptian tourist and international/virtual flea markets as well as in artistic interventions through the exhibit Making the Postcard Women’s Imaginarium: Dreaming our Futures Out of our Pasts (2022) curated by Salma Ahmad Caller. To mitigate the limits of the archive, I am inspired by critical fabulation to honour myself as a researcher and imagine the realities of the subjects of the photographs