In Kuwait in Postcards (2009), Ali Rais has arranged and annotated his impressive collection of postcards of Kuwait from the 1920s to the 1970s. Algerian writer Malek Alloula has stated that the postcard “straddles two spaces: the one it represents and the one it will reach” (Colonial 4). Rais’s publication creates an unintentional boomerang effect since the postcards, produced specifically to travel beyond Kuwait, have now returned home. I suggest that the postcard, as unlikely historical fragment, can reveal not only an overlooked national narrative but also why this particular narrative has been forgotten. This overlooked national narrative can be detected in the postcards from the late 1950s to the 1970s. These decades correspond to the post-oil period in Kuwait generally recognized as its modernity. In postcards, this period is depicted through images of an energetically developing nation-state and includes images of art deco buildings, ministries, a parliament, clean city streets, cinemas, casinos, busy beaches, fountains, parks, schools, hospitals, a university campus, markets, cars, beachfront hotels, etc. Together, these images construct a “phantasm,” which gets produced, according to Gilles Deleuze, “when sensibility transmits its constraint to the imagination [and] the imagination in turn is raised to the level of transcendent exercise” (Difference 144). A phantasm may be understood as an effect of the imagination confronting what has not necessarily been fully actualized but what may yet come to be. The phantasm constructed by the postcards in question was not only an effect of how Kuwait saw itself at that time but also of how it wanted to represent itself to those beyond its borders. My paper (informed by Alloula, Deleuze, Derrida, and Ricoeur and utilizing a cultural studies approach) will focus, first, on the link between these phantasmic representations in postcards (Rais) and the socio-political agenda during Kuwait’s modernity, and, second, on the function served today by forgetting the phantasm. Forgetting the phantasm makes it possible to construct a historical narrative that elides the national image of Kuwait as open, modern, efficient, democratic, and “westernized”; in so doing, it restricts the national image to religious and tribalist representations currently circulating as historical “truth.” In addition, forgetting the early promises of the nation-state makes it possible to disregard its serious failures. Reckoning with these postcard memories can, at the very least, shift Kuwait’s univocal conception of its national history and, rather more optimistically, challenge an often inept and stultified present.