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Cosmopolitanism has been invoked to stress the potential advantages of thinking beyond the nation with regard to human rights, diasporic or intellectual affinities, as well as other forms of affiliation. However, nationalism does not have to amount to a mere manifestation of ethnic or xenophobic closure, and it may foreground an effective cosmopolitanism that ensures social rights on a local and a transnational level. The author considers not only the European nationalist tradition but also the ways in which it was appropriated and redefined in non-European places as a condition of the possibility for more effective transnational, cosmopolitan alliances.

Representations of Africa tend to reproduce old stereotypes, adapted to recent trends but ultimately reproducing, even in postcolonial times, a largely negative and monolithic image of a diverse continent. The same can be said of cinema. A more or less consensual approach to "African cinema" associates it with exoticism, making it into a genre easily recognized by Western audiences. It is this idea of a backward, monolithic Africa that the curators of African Screens, Manthia Diawara and Lydie Diakhaté, intended to challenge. The provocative gesture can be found in the choice of the film screened at the inaugural session, Les saignantes, by Jean-Pierre Bekolo. The same applies to Juju Factory, by Balufu Bakupa Kanyinda. Both films question ideas of "authentic" representations of "Africanness," introducing a complex cinematic language that shows how contemporary African film not only is diverse in its tendencies but also relates in diverse ways to different trans/national traditions and models.