This paper takes as a point of departure Bruce Grant’s The Captive and the Gift to explore how the fascist Italian empire claimed sovereignty over its conquered Libyan bodies through a language of giving and imaginaries of gifts and barbarity. Grant sets up imperial space as a field of political and semiotic exchanges where the value of gifts is primarily performative, in the double sense of being both an utterance that changes social reality by enacting giving, and a visual public performance. Giving is encased within a spectacle of grandeur simultaneously interpellating the subjects of empire and its competitors, claiming sovereignty over the former and reminding the latter of its unsurpassable power and magnanimity. To think through the performative aspect of gift exchange within empire, this paper will examine how imperial cinema and official state displays of self-legitimation serve as the points de capiton of empire, consolidating and fixing meaning to create a consistent language of exchange within the Libyan context under fascist Italian colonialism. The paper will be looking at multiple circuits of exchange that reinforce one another. From the material gifts given by Mussolini, such as bronze statues of Caesar placed in central urban spaces in Italian colonies as well as gifts that Mussolini “received” from the Libyan colony, such as the sword of Islam, which was welded in Italy and ceremoniously given to Mussolini by Libyan collaborators, to the more symbolic ones teased out through a reading of two fascist Italian films set in Libya at pivotal points in the history of fascist colonialism: Mario Camerini’s Kif Tebbi (1928) and Augusto Genina’s Bengasi (1942). The paper will explore how the rhetoric of fascist affinity with Islam and protection of Libyan soil against the competitors of empire—here the Ottoman and the British - were deployed as a way to produce an exchange in which the colony becomes a laboratory of fascist masculinity. Italian soldiers are thus sent to Libyan soil to harvest the force of both Roman soldiers and indigenous “savages,” in the guise of protection and alliance, which is then constrained and sculpted to produce the Uomo Nuovo, the ideal man conforming to the aesthetics and ideology of fascism.