I'm unsure if this is an actual problem or intentional on graphql-relay's end but when using graphene hooked into django (1.8.6) cursor based querying returns the same result set as without. This is due to the aforementioned function (in graphql_relay.connection.arrayconnection) specifically only allowing instances of str. I monkeypatched an alternative function that casts the unicode to str and was able to get sliced results.