Is there a way to replace Django's smart_str with a Python native solution?

I am passing with a code base that is using the smart_str method of Django:

 for p in pro:
        print smart_str(p["title"])

I want to replace it with a native python solution without involving django inside but I am not sure what smart_str exactly do:

smart_str(s, encoding='utf-8', strings_only=False, errors='strict')

Alias of smart_bytes() on Python 2 and smart_text() on Python 3. This function returns a str or a lazy string.

and

smart_bytes(s, encoding='utf-8', strings_only=False,errors='strict')

Returns a bytestring version of s, encoded as specified in encoding.

If strings_only is True, don’t convert (some) non-string-like objects.

Could we replace it simply with print unicode(u'xa1').encode("utf-8")?